October 16, 2025
By Michael Barry
Old bikes often come in the shop, built from the 1930’s to the 70’s, for small repairs or complete restorations. From use they have developed a patina of wear: paint rubbed away on the top tube from a leg touching after each dismount, the once brilliant colours now muted and faded from where the sun hits, the steel on the carrier worn where the panniers rubbed, a chainguard cracked and fixed in a garage. The bikes are tools for daily transport whether to work or the bakery. Well designed, they are easy to repair, fit for the purpose, and resilient. It is a pleasure to work on them, to fix them up and see them continue to be used daily.
BGA France 1936
Over fifty years ago, when my father and his business partner, Mike Brown were running the shop downtown, their goal was to build high quality bicycles. At the time, few proper touring bikes and city bikes were available in North America. They had both grown up in England and had spent much of their lives around bikes: they raced them, commuted on them and toured extensively. They understood what made a bike great. For generations, the French made the most functional touring and city bikes while the Italians knew how to build some of the best racing bicycles.
Racing bikes are sexiest to most, but the French city bikes and touring bikes are the most practical for most cyclists. To me, they are the loveliest as everything is integrated, in place, with their small complexities hidden, making them both functional and elegant. I appreciate the engineering and precision built into modern race bicycles with their electric shifting, aerodynamic pieces, and the speed with which they move, but they have lost the simplicity that made bicycles accessible to all, easy to fix, practical and inexpensive. Most of the old French bikes didn’t cost a fortune when purchased decades ago but were run of the mill city bikes, many made in the heart of bicycle and munitions manufacturing in the Saint Etienne valley, passing through the hands of labourers before reaching shop floors.
There is uniformity in design yet individualization in workmanship. The hand painted pin strips show the brush strokes, sometimes with a small squiggle from a shake. A braze-on might be slightly askew. A file mark on a lug too deep. They are the lines of work, the faults that lie on the frame like a birthmark on skin, that mass production bikes, built by machines, no longer have as the robot eliminates the marks of the human. None of it affects the performance of the bicycle but shows it has passed through the hands of a human with intention, who has worked laboriously, devoting their life to a trade to build thousands of bicycles, that will likely have a positive affect on the lives of another.
From the start of the last century, bicycle production was thriving across Europe as the bicycle provided inexpensive freedom of mobility. As cyclists pedaled through the streets, the bicycle’s thoughtful, and brilliant, design made it seem as though it had simply become an extension of the skirted woman riding to the factory for a day’s work, or the suit-dressed man to the bar to meet others for a game of cards. On a bike, the human is integrated with the machine, flowing with little impact through the environment. Good bicycles are comfortable yet elegant in their design and craftsmanship. They are practical and safe with their generator lighting, carriers and mudguards. Riding through the city or the countryside, the cyclist is engaged with the surroundings in a sensory experience of aromas, sights, sounds and touch, with the wind on their face– a properly designed bicycle will become part of them, with nothing uncomfortable or annoying, creating what can often be a memorable emotional experience.
Some old bikes that come into the shop have the names of their original owners painted on the tubing, or the decals from the shops in small villages in France where they were first purchased. I imagine the stories the bicycles carry: The kilometres traveled, the neglect in a barn, the babies transported on the carrier, the girlfriends sitting on the top tube as their friend pedals them home from school, the light flickering in the darkness as the drunken cyclist wobbles home from the bar, the journeys to the coast to dip the sea, or the trips into the countryside to hunt for and fill the panniers with mushrooms. They are idyllic images but also real.
As a young bike racer, working his way towards a career in professional cycling, I spent my first racing seasons abroad in a French suburb of Geneva--a literal stone's throw from the Swiss border. Having grown up surrounded by bicycles, I had already developed an appreciation for a proper city bike. At an age and in a time when many of my teammates were eyeing fast cars, I hunted through second hand markets and antique shops looking for dusty vintage city bikes. My racing bike took me into the mountains, but I needed a bicycle to carry me into Geneva–one that was comfortable over the tram lines, that could carry my shopping, that lit my way home at night, and that I could lock to a post without worry. I rode one up mountain passes, the other into a bustling metropolis. Both bicycles helped me discover and learn about my new home, as I began to understand and integrating into a culture new to me.
As I build new Mariposas in the workshop, I often think of where the bicycles will end up, where they will carry their owners, and what they will mean to them. I think of my father and Mike Brown, and what they taught me, and handed down. The process is layered with both thought and emotion. While bending and then brazing the tubing for a carrier, I think back to the builders in France who bent and brazed daily; while assembling the bicycle I imagine what it will carry and to where it will travel.
