Raleigh - The demise of a British Icon?

Interested to know people’s thoughts and perceptions on the iconic British brand and perhaps why the brand has ended up where it is today.

As a youngster growing up in middle England it was all about Raleigh for my cohorts and I. Having just missed the ‘chopper’ generation it was all Strikas, Grifters and Boxers then slightly latterly the iconic Burner.
As I progressed into senior school the “racer” was the thing to have, ideally a Raleigh Equipe or maybe even Team Banana.
Step forward to early teens the mtb craze hit. Perhaps here Raleigh began in a way to shape it’s own downfall. Although my first mtb was a Raleigh it wasn’t my first choice. Throughout the 90s although Raleigh seemed to do some interesting stuff though none really fired the imagination (with perhaps the exception of the US Tomac tie in). That said they must’ve sold because there were plenty about. Perhaps Raleigh was proof that you can’t sell bikes to all market segments from low end to high end anymore, this is borne out in part by their current strategy.

On to the late 90s / early 00s and the closure of the Raleigh plant and disbanding of the Raleigh team was surely a low point for the Heron brand and British cycling and manufacturing.

When I look at what Raleigh produce now and compare it with what they have achieved and produced in the past it does make me slightly melancholic. Compare the Halfords specials with the likes of Reg Harris on the track, Zoetemelk and the TI Raleigh squad on their 753 Team pros, Fignon on his Raleigh battling the clock in Paris (maybe a nice metaphor for fate of Raleigh overall), Andy Ruffell on his Team Burner and Dave Baker on his Team Dynatech. What happened to what was once the largest cycle manufacturer in the world?

Raleigh meant bicycle to me as a child.

All the bikes I ever rode were christmas presents in my childhood and were always Raleighs. My father would not consider anything else, he had one, his father had one etc.

In the 70's Raleigh had all the interesting stuff that anyone had ever heard of ie. Choppers, Grifters,Bombers etc. No internet then so exotica from other manufacturers never got a look in.

Result is I have a nostalgia for Raleighs and at least one sits in any collection of bikes I would have. A roadster and an mtb at the mo.

Thing i've never liked is weight, Raleigh seemed proud of their all steel machines as if weighing twice as much as they needed to be was a good thing :roll:

Oversized steel tubed mtb's following alloy built bike style was classic form over function. They conveniently forgot why alloy bikes were built in such a manner just going for the look. That is a good reason why I think they started to fail. Making a pastiche of something good out of cheap materials gave them a bad reputation that their good stuff could not rescue them from

They became renowned for cheap and its unlikely they'll ever live it down as long as people remember the bad old days.

Velo

They were always going to lose.
The bottom line is, no-one would be prepared to spend the kind of money a Raleigh would cost if it was built in Nottingham.
Look at my 1948 Raleigh Sports. A frame made of Raleigh's own tubing, with Raleigh wheels (SA was a Raleigh company), even Raleigh pedals! Nothing's manufactured that way anymore, the overheads are too high.
The nearest thing to them now is Pashley, but they produce a very low number of very high quality (not the same thing as lightweight) bikes. People are happy to pay the (justifyably) high price of a Pashley, because they know they're getting something which is high quality. But they have a different ethos to Raleigh, and slightly more prestige. Raleigh was all about bikes for everyone, unashamedly a mass producer.
Incidentally, have you seen the Guv'nor? It is Bike Porn.

Personally, Raliegh always stood for 'cheap' - this reputation overshadowed any quality stuff for years and always tainted it for me.

I am now only just coming back to Raliegh after educating myself on this very site - I now have a coveted Ti Raliegh Ilkstone built frame which I will happily spend some time in a proper restoration - prior to this, Raliegh was just cheap tat that I often ignored or broke up for parts..

Raleigh, Raliegh, Rayleigh, Railiegh

chris667":2cclyk27 said:

Incidentally, have you seen the Guv'nor? It is Bike p*rn.

Click to expand...

+1

Yeah same here.
Grew up near Derby / Notts, grandad worked for TI & uncle worked at the Raleigh factory in Nottingham so my first 'proper' bike was a metallic red Grifter for christmas '77.
Loved that bike - did anyone else bend the rubber mudguard extensions in so it rubbed on the tyres as you rode & sounded like a 2 stroke trials bike?
Kept it 'til '84 when I got my Dad's re-furbed Mercian tourer.
It was a really good bike but lusted after a real racer like all my mates had - Raleigh Record Sprint (black & gold like the JPS Lotus F1 car) & Team Panasonic replicas.
I'd say Raleigh peaked mid/late 90's - the Timet plasma welded Ti frame era. Would spend many a lunchtime drooling over the M-Trax 450 Elite in Samways Derby.

As previously mentioned Raleigh were bikes for everyone and thats how I felt about them BITD. I started with a mini burner and even had a Mustang, they were cheap enough bikes and they can't of done me any harm as i'm still here riding. I liked the fact that you could own a Raleigh for not a lot and yet see the brand dominate the professional scene with the special products bikes. They also had a massive dealer network, so parts were never a problem.

It may have all went wrong in the early to mid nineties with the high end Dyna-Techs. Not that the bikes weren't any good but more the loss of confidence and PR disaster of the early models glued bond failing. I think when you see the top of the range bikes failing, the alarm bells start ringing and reading between the lines in the old magazines shops could hardly give them away from that point. Which is a real shame as only the first few batches actually failed (and replaced under warranty). The Dyna-Techs are fabulous bikes that ride incredibly well, many retrobikers in the know would rather this be kept a secret to keep them cheap!

I don't think having the seperate Raleigh USA bikes helped also. They were completely different to the UK models and this just made you wonder why? If the UK models were as good as in the brochure, why then do the yanks require something so different.

Prehaps many of us just wanted a change. We'd grown up on Raleighs and then all of a sudden we had numerous choices with all these radical new bikes being shipped in from the American brands. Many of which were better specced for the money. Others were simply more fashionable and we just forgot about good old Raleigh.

Once Raleigh had lost those spenting the big bucks, the only market remaining was the cheaper Halfords end and this looks to be where they have focused. I'd prefer if Raleigh stayed where they are with the low end and accessories markets. If they were to try and get back to the top I think they would now fall flat on their face. The times, designs, professionalism and materials have moved to far away for Raleigh to compete. I doubt they could attact the big name riders either, many of todays talent have never owned a Raleigh and would probably be as likely to ride for Apollo as Raleigh.

I think somewhere down the line they just lost their 'cool'... :roll:

Raleigh USA is actually a different company - it's not just a different range of bikes.

If you look at this year's range though there's some good stuff - The Avanti range of carbon road bikes (though I'm not sure about re-using the Avanti name from their early MTBs) and the re-launched M-Trax bikes are pretty smart.

Tony Hadland has an interesting, longish essay on Raleigh's decline here:

http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~hadland/raleigh.htm

I learnt to ride on a hand-me-down Raleigh Gresham Flyer. When I was a kid the street was full of Grifters and Bombers, and then Burners.

Some aspects of the decline were inevitable. In the postwar years everybody rode a bike. Prosperity brought an increase in car use and a corresponding decline in utility cycling. The failure to hang on to the youth market during the MTB boom was really the nail in the coffin. It's a real shame, but it mirrors the fate of much of Britain's manufacturing industry in recent decades.