“Most people think Britain was better 50 years ago,” asserted the headline of a Daily Telegraph piece in mid-November. “UK residents feel that environment was cleaner, streets safer and people happier in 1975,” added the article’s sub-head. Were the mid-1970s some golden age of pristine streets and smiling locals? Not according to newspapers and commentators of the time.
“What is certain, and felt instinctively by almost everybody,” editorialised The Times in 1975, “is that things cannot go on in their present way.” Prominent academic Professor Stephen Haseler wrote in the same year: “It is difficult to imagine a previous period when such an all-pervasive hopelessness was exhibited at all levels of British life.”
Seventies Britain was troubled by flying pickets, power cuts, and productivity chasms. There was such a general malaise that, in 1974, Foreign Secretary Jim Callaghan (soon to become Prime Minister) had moaned: “If I were a young man, I should emigrate.”
Nostalgia, then, is an unreliable emotion. Unreliable generally and unreliable for the history of bicycle sales, too. Many may think the post-COVID cycle market slump was cataclysmic — and for those who lost long-term jobs or closed their firms, it surely was — but, even in the depths of this awful trough, we were still selling a great deal more bikes per year than in the early 1970s when it might be presumed by many that Raleigh’s Chopper must have been going gangbusters.
In fact, just 800,000 cycles were sold in the UK in 1973; of all types, banana-saddle bicycles included. In 1969, the British cycle industry had shifted just 572,000 units. (Raleigh introduced the Chopper in 1968.) Cycle sales increased somewhat through 1974 and 1975, although nowhere near the increase seen in the US in the same period, when the four-year-long early-1970s “bike boom” was built on baby-boomer wealth, burgeoning environmental concerns, and the same health kick that saw the rise of jogging. The Great American Bicycle Boom of 1971-4 (which spawned Cannondale, Specialized and other US brands) resulted in bumper sales far larger than the mountain-bike boom that followed in the 1980s.
A contemporary Bank of America report said US bicycle sales had been “rolling along” at 6 million a year “until the boom began.” In 1971, sales jumped to 9 million, and in 1972 they reached 14 million. In the following year, this climbed further to 15.3 million.
Yet in 1974 the market shrank precipitiously almost over night. The reasons why are complex, but they include the fact that the bikes sold at the height of the US boom were poor-quality imports, which eventually deflated the desire to ride. It was also the case that it had been environmentalists fighting bicycling’s corner, and they moved on to other issues, such as anti-nuclear campaigns and saving whales.
Perhaps the biggest reason for the sales collapse was the hoola-hoop problem: 1970s cycling in the US was a craze, and those attracted to it were not sufficiently sold on the idea to keep riding long-term, either recreationally or for Dutch-style daily transport.
The cycle industry is classically, ahem, cyclical. Spikes and dips are normal, going right back to the early days of cycling. The 1890s “bike boom” — when cycling was super popular with elites, from the middle classes to royalty, not yet the workers — was a bust by 1897.
There’s nobody alive who experienced this Victorian golden era of cycling, but there will be a few industry veterans who personally remember the dark days of the 1970s, when, in the UK, so few bicycles were sold. More veterans were working during the BMX booms and busts of the early 1980s and then, a few years later, the rise and fall of mountain bikes.
I’m guessing those who survived such booms and busts — me included — were saddened but not surprised by the calamitous post-COVID fall in cycle sales.
As a veteran of the bicycle industry — I founded this magazine [BikeBiz] in 1999 and previously worked for the long-since-defunct Cycle Industry trade magazine — I assumed there would be a massive slump after the COVID bike boom. That’s because I reported on previous slumps. It’s also because I’m an historian and I’ve researched cycling’s booms and busts down the years (I wrote the history book Bike Boom, a follow-up to Roads Were Not Built for Cars). Exceptional events such as global pandemics notwithstanding, bicycling booms generally happen every twenty years or so.
Clearly, we’d sell more bicycles if more people were cycling. How to achieve this, though? A prominent school of thought holds that veining the country with cycleways would do the trick, and that the cycle industry should focus all of its promotional efforts on advocacy to achieve this goal.
Many assume that the expansion of the Dutch cycleway network in the 1970s and 1980s must have led to a renaissance of everyday cycling in the Netherlands. In fact, it arrested a precipitous decline, with cycle use in the Netherlands in the 1970s being not a patch on what it had been in the 1930s. Cyclists in Amsterdam accounted for more than 70 percent of traffic on the roads in 1925. In the Dutch city of Enschede, cycling’s “modal share” was closer to 90 percent at the time. Between 1950 and 1970, cycle use in the Netherlands declined, but it stabilized after 1975, thanks in part to the reallocation of roadspace away from motor cars and the expansion of cycle networks. Enschede now has a cycling modal share of under 40 percent, and Amsterdam a little over 30 percent.
So, a cynic might say that the easiest way for a city to achieve a cycling modal share of 25 percent is to start with one of 50 percent.
Falling in and out of favour is not something that can be controlled. Booms are usually powered by prevailing fashions, and fashion, by definition, is fickle. Looking on the bright side, there are bumper days ahead for the cycle industry; just be aware there will likely be a dip in sales soon thereafter.
See: https://content.yudu.com/web/69r/0A44aiw/BikeBizJanuary2026/html/index.html?page=38