Brompton B75: Eighteen Months On

Back in May 2020 I bought a Brompton B75. Let's see how it coped with eighteen months of being sat on and pounded by my muscular legs. Surprisingly well is the answer.

The B75 is Brompton's budget model, although at £745 it's not cheap by objective standards. You could buy a car for £745. But can you fold a car? Can you put a car in the boot of another car? Besides which I've always wanted a Brompton. They've been around since the early 1980s and have a large cult following, so parts and servicing are widely available, and they hold their value, but more on this later.

In the end the COVID pandemic forced my hand. "If not now, when?" NB I bought the bike with my own money and I have no professional affiliation with Brompton, I just like their bikes.

I went to Prague at the beginning of February 2020 (pictured), at which point COVID was thunder on the horizon. Over the coming weeks it didn't go away; a short while later I went to see Lawrence of Arabia at the cinema, and about a week after that the cinemas shut for a very long time.

I'm in the fortunate position of being able to cycle to work, but carrying a full-sized bicycle into an elevator and finding somewhere to park etc isn't fun. A Brompton on the other hand is luggable, and it's small enough to sit in the corner of an office. It's a rare example of a made-in-Britain thing that fills a genuine niche and isn't horribly unreliable. The Raspberry Pi of cycles.

I'm not an expert on mass psychology, but I have the impression that the shock of the initial COVID lockdown caused the people of Britain to hoard food, toilet rolls, other essentials, but not bicycles. That came slightly later, when it became apparent that COVID was not a flash in the pan.

I mention this because almost immediately after I bought my B75 Brompton sold out of almost everything. The B75 is still listed on their website, now priced £850, but you can't buy it because it's still sold out. Perhaps it's available from Brompton's physical stores. As of this writing the cheapest Brompton available from the company's website costs £1,315, for a basic three-speed model. eBay listings for second-hand B75s seem to hover around £900 or so, which is nice to know, although I don't plan to sell mine because I actually use it. It's not an investment.

At the back of my mind I'm worried about theft. I haven't bothered with a bike lock or chain, and I'm not sure how they would work with a folding bike. When I'm out and about I carry it with me at all times. Someone could of course mug me for it, but there isn't a great deal I can do about that.

What is the B75? It's a budget Brompton introduced in 2018. It uses a bunch of older components from Brompton's parts stockpile, specifically the gear selectors, handlebars, and fixed plastic pedals. It comes without a rear mudguard or a front luggage block, or lights, or a pump. It has a three-speed Sturmey Archer hub gearbox geared slightly lower than the standard three-speed model, plus an extended seatpost. It's only available in a bluey-greeny colour.

Before buying a Brompton I considered a cheaper folding bike, but not for very long. The market is split between micro-miniature folders such as the Strida or the probably-now-discontinued A-Bike, which are only really useful for getting from one block of a city to another, or alternatively larger bikes such as the Dahon Mu, which are essentially small normal bicycles with a fold in the middle. They're handy if you plan to transport your bike around in the boot of a car, but I wanted something smaller that I could carry in my hands if necessary.

A few months into the pandemic Aldi also started selling a folding bike, but again it was too large for my needs. It was apparently a rebadged Freespirit Ruck, which is made in China and imported with lots of different names. Aldi's version sold for around £260 although as with the B75 it sold out almost immediately, which is why I'm writing about it in the past tense.

After a couple of practice folds I find the Brompton's mechanism quick and easy. The other folding bikes I looked at - a Raleigh Evo-2, and a Carrera something-or-other - felt awkward. With more practice the fold might have become second nature, but they felt like normal bikes with a stowage mode rather than a dedicated folding bike that you can fold and unfold regularly. So a Brompton it was.

In any case I didn't plan to take long trips with my bike. My plan was to commute to work on nice days, which is a round trip of around five miles albeit that part of it involves a hill with a 12% gradient, breathe in, but otherwise keep it folded away during the winter months. In the end I have however taken it on two long trips.

Firstly was a trip to Pisa back in September 2020. I specifically wanted to cycle around nearby Lucca, which has an old town surrounded by a castle wall. Everybody likes Lucca. It doesn't have a single well-defined tourist draw on a par with the leaning tower, or the Uffizi, but it's just generally nice.

I transported the B75 with a pair of IKEA Dimpa bags, plus some insulating material and a yoga mat. This arrangement survived the hold of an EasyJet A320 although I wouldn't recommend anybody else try it. I was feeling a bit devil-may-care. The B75 also held up to the crowds and cobblestones of Lucca's town centre. My original plan was to cycle from Lucca to Pisa, but after getting there and looking at the Italian traffic and thinking about the tunnels and hills I chickened out. In the end I merely cycled around Lucca and Pisa, going nowhere, but in paradise. Is that the bargain, o God? To be trapped, but in paradise? To go round and around in circles, but in paradise? Is that the bargain?

Now, this wasn't really a test of the bike's endurance. I probably only cycled a dozen or so miles in total while in Italy. It was really more a proof of concept to see if I could take the B75 abroad.

The COVID pandemic seemed to abate naturally in late 2020, but it came back with redoubled fury at the beginning of 2021, so foreign travel was off the cards. Instead I used the B75 intermittently for commuting, which involves a two-mile cycle each way to work, with a 12% hill at one point. Does cycling help prevent COVID? I kept thinking of The Andromeda Strain. You remember? The little baby survived Andromeda because its blood was slightly alkaline, because it kept crying, which caused it to breathe out lots of (acidic) carbon dioxide, thus reducing its blood pH.

But Andromeda wasn't a virus - it was a crystal thing - and viruses such as COVID are apparently not affected by blood alkaline levels. So, no, I doubt that breathing heavily and sweating will protect anyone from COVID. No.

As a commuting bicycle the B75 is in its element. No-one complains if you store it in a corner of the office, because it's chic. A Brompton isn't geeky enough to peg you as a bicycle nerd. It doesn't smell, or leak oil. It's geared for stop-start acceleration and I find it easiest to ride on a slight hill. On the flat it quickly runs out of gears, and I feel as if I'm just windmilling my legs. The fastest I have gone is about 13mph, downhill. The Sturmey Archer hub apparently has a lot of friction; in top gear it makes a click-click-click noise but this is apparently normal.

Its terrible with potholes, but it's so pointy that I can easily dodge around them. The only thing that went wrong is the gear selector, which is a wire that screws into a thingy attached to the gear hub. At one point I was unable to select the lowest gear, but after adjusting the wire (as per this official video) everything worked again, and has continued to work ever since.

Let's have some up-to-date photos of the bike:

Brompton has a free service at the 100-mile mark, so I took it up to Brompton Central in London to be looked at. I asked them to fit some Schwalbe Marathon tyres, which are one of the few reinforced tyres in the Brompton's 16" size. A year later they've barely worn, and thankfully I haven't had any punctures yet.

The paint on the hinges has a bit of wear, but otherwise the hinges don't feel any looser than they did when new. I had always assumed the clamps were under a lot of strain but they have held up well.

An aftermarket removable pedal. It's not really practical day-to-day (too greasy) but it helps if you're putting the bike in a bag.

In July 2021 I did however subject the B75 to much harsher treatment. As mentioned passim I did a bikepacking tour from Oban, west of Glasgow, up to Castle Stalker, camping on the way. I've always wanted to see Castle Stalker. It was "Castle Arrrrrggghhh" in Monty Python and the Holy Grail. It's a short drive north of Oban, but I don't drive! The road isn't suitable for bikes, but luckily National Cycle Route 78 goes from Oban to Castle Stalker and beyond.

I could have avoided this whole section of road - section 1 in the map above, by far the hardest part - if I had got off the train at Connell Ferry instead of Oban. The rest of the trip was mostly flat.

Accounting for the twists and turns in the route - and assuming that the sign above is correct - I cycled about thirty miles, and pushed the bike for another couple of miles. Twenty miles from Oban to Castle Stalker, then ten miles back to Connell Ferry, which is closer to Castle Stalker than Oban.

My original plan was to continue up to a village called Duror, and then explore the area there, visiting a bothy in the hills above it, but in the end I again decided not to overextend myself. The journey wasn't dangerous, and I was always within walking distance of a pub or indeed Oban itself, but I didn't fancy walking thirty miles with a broken bike.

This trip was harsher for two reasons. I loaded up the B75's front luggage rack with a Brompton Large Metro Bag, and I loaded my back with an old CabinMax backpack that I bought ages ago and never used because of the ridiculous colour. I don't know what I was thinking. The total load was probably only 10kg or so, but I was worried that if I bounced over a pothole the sudden jerk might snap off the luggage block or bend the seatpost.

In the end however nothing went wrong. I had to push the cycle up some rough gravel tracks on the way to a nearby reservoir, where I camped, but the tyres held up just fine. The bike spent two nights in the rain, covered in a raincoat, and didn't rust. That area has several caravan camping parks, including one right next to Oban airport, so if you don't fancy wild camping in the outdoors (with the risk that you might not find a spot!) you could alternatively stay in one of the caravan parks and use a full-sized bike to expore Route 78. Or alternatively stay in the hotel at Port Appin.

If the B75 had broken I would have had a boring walk back to civilisation, but it held up. This chap cycled from Tibet to Myanmar on a Brompton, so obviously I only scratched the surface of the bike's endurance. These people cycled around the hills of Cuba. Surprisingly Brompton doesn't make a dedicated off-road touring model. There's the Brompton Explore, but it's mostly just a cosmetic modification, with lower gear ratios and better tyres. Perhaps the fold limits what they could do.

On one level a Brompton is incredibly handy for long-range touring - it'll fit inside most buses and trains, and it can be carried over fences and stowed in a hotel room etc - except for the actual "riding over mud" part. As a pushable pack mule the lack of a crossbar limits its load. It's also surprisingly hard to push the bike uphill. With a lot of weight over the front axle I found that pushing the B75 uphill caused it to tip forward unless I lifted it up a bit, which was wearying.

Do I have any more to say? After eighteen months of relatively modest treatment my B75 has cost me zero pounds in servicing and still seems to be going strong. It appears to be built to the same standard as any other Brompton, and judging by the websites above other people have thrashed their Bromptons much harder than mine without breaking them. Let's hope it keeps up!