What We Lost When We Stopped Making Things

Lessons from one of Britain’s last bicycle framebuilders

A Workshop Most People Don’t Know Exists

When I’m working in the workshop, visible through the shop window to passing pedestrians and cars waiting at the traffic lights outside, I often wonder what people think I actually do in here.

They see bicycles hanging from hooks, racks of tools blackened with age, and sometimes the glow of a torch through the smoke. Most probably assume it’s just another bike shop. But there is nothing ordinary about what happens inside these four walls, especially in Britain in 2026.

Even when people step inside, encounter the smell of flux, the smoke rising from a bicycle frame on the bench, and the rows of hand files hanging above it, they still mostly think: bike shop.

The used bicycles in the showroom and the racks of spanners and tools give the game away. I repair bikes. Possibly sell a few old ones too.

But if you assumed that, you would probably miss the fact that one of Britain’s rarest surviving crafts still takes place in this workshop. And you could hardly be blamed for not noticing it, because who expects bicycle frames to still be made by hand? Surely all bicycle frames are imported now.

What Is Framebuilding?

My week usually begins with a collection of thin steel tubes and frame parts laid across the bench alongside an idea in my head about the bicycle they will eventually become.

The first day is often spent preparing the parts for brazing. Steel lugs are carefully shaped and cleaned using hand files until the tubes fit together precisely. By the end of the afternoon the bench is usually covered in iron filings, flux, and little curls of steel shaved away by hand.

Then comes the brazing itself. Flux is brushed thickly around the joints before they are heated beneath the gas torch, until the steel begins glowing softly red. Smoke drifts out from inside the tubes as the protective oils burn away, and the sharp smell of hot flux still takes me straight back to the first time I nervously stepped into Andrew’s workshop as a teenager.

Thin brass rods are then melted into the joints, drawn through the gaps by careful control of heat and capillary action. Once cooled, the tubes are bonded together.

After yet more filing, shaping, alignment, and finishing, something unexpected gradually emerges from the chaos of loose parts and metal dust.

A bicycle frame is born.

What Makes Framebuilding Different?

It feels like a very long time ago now, but the postman would arrive each morning carrying handwritten letters from customers around the country.

One might be from Mr McCormack in Fife, carefully explaining how he raced in the local club scene and describing, often in great detail, the exact frame parts he wanted for his new bicycle. He would mention the size he needed, the colours he preferred, perhaps even the type of riding he imagined the frame carrying him through.

The letters were usually opened by John Briggs, who would then pass them across to his brother. One of them would sit down with a little carbon copy order book and translate Mr McCormack’s enthusiastic handwriting into the shorthand language used inside the workshop.

Eventually the order would make its way to Andrew the framebuilder.

Andrew was not a man of many words, especially on a Monday morning after a Sunday evening spent in the working men’s club playing snooker. He would usually acknowledge the order with little more than a grunt before quietly getting on with the job.

Then, over the course of the following week, he would gradually turn a collection of thin steel tubes and frame parts into a lightweight bicycle frame built entirely by hand.

At no point would he consult a computer, model the frame in CAD software, or produce detailed technical drawings. Much of the process existed instead inside memory, judgement, repetition, and accumulated experience.

He already carried a sense of the frame in his imagination long before it physically existed. And somewhere within that process were also the remembered lessons of Jack Briggs, who had taught him decades earlier.

By the end of the week, the frame would simply be there, hanging finished in the workshop.

Most modern products are designed very differently now.

Somewhere far away from the factory floor, a designer sits at a computer studying data about “average users”, production costs, manufacturing tolerances, and market trends. Every dimension is modelled in advance. Every process is planned for speed, consistency, and scale long before a physical object exists at all.

By the time the product reaches the factory, almost every decision has already been made. The worker assembling it follows a process designed to remove uncertainty and variation.

My first introduction to framebuilding was not actually through the making of new frames at all.

When I was fresh out of school, working as a sales assistant, I was introduced to a world where cyclists would bring in beloved old frames to be repainted and rebuilt for another decade of use. Sometimes it was the third or fourth time they had done this. The frame might need repairs, alterations, or new fittings added along the way, but the assumption was always that the bicycle would continue living on.

Long-term use was baked into the craft itself. That was part of what first fascinated me about it. A handmade steel frame was never treated as disposable. It was something to maintain, adapt, repair, and gradually shape around a person over years, sometimes even generations.

Once you spend time in a world like that, it becomes difficult not to imagine how differently other parts of society might function if longevity and repair were designed into things from the beginning.

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Britain Once Knew This World

We often talk about deindustrialisation in abstract economic language. Manufacturing moved overseas because it was more efficient. Britain became a service economy. Manual work declined because supposedly nobody wanted to do these jobs anymore.

But the reality was never quite that simple. Very few people asked the workers, apprentices, mechanics, welders, machinists, or framebuilders what they thought was being lost.

Go back forty years, and Britain looked very different from the country we inhabit today. Skilled manual work still existed visibly within everyday life. Workshops, factories, garages, foundries, and engineering firms formed part of the social landscape of many towns and cities.

Manual trades were often looked down upon by parts of the education system, but the pathways into this kind of work still existed. As a young person, you had examples around you. You could see adults making things, fixing things, building lives around practical skill. The route into that world was not mysterious. It was well-trodden.

Framebuilding was part of this world. It did not exist in isolation, but sat alongside the wider culture of British engineering and skilled manual work.

A local framebuilder would have seemed no more unusual than a fabricator, machinist, toolmaker, or boilermaker. If there was a framebuilding workshop in your town, working there was simply another possible path into adult life.

The craft itself has roots stretching back into British light engineering and metalworking traditions of the Victorian era. By the 1970s, bicycle framebuilding had become a highly developed and specialised trade, shaped by decades of refinement, experimentation, and accumulated practical knowledge.

Much of this knowledge was never fully written down or formally quantified. It existed instead within the wider culture of engineering crafts: in habits, judgement, observation, correction, and repeated practice. That is why these skills were traditionally passed on through apprenticeships rather than textbooks alone.

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The Craft That Became Invisible

By the time I entered the trade in 2000, the world surrounding British framebuilding had already changed enormously.

My mentor Andrew was beginning to wonder aloud whether he might be better off working at Asda stacking shelves. Orders had declined so dramatically that John and Paul increasingly had him doing odd jobs around the shop or helping with general bicycle repairs simply to keep him occupied.

Looking back now, I think the situation was beginning to affect him quite deeply.

It probably did not help that my younger self constantly followed him around asking endless questions and pestering him to teach me the trade. John and Paul could not really understand why I was so interested in learning it at all. As far as they were concerned, the craft had largely run its course and they were only continuing to employ Andrew out of loyalty and respect for his years in the workshop.

The cycling world itself had changed too.

Professional riders no longer raced on frames built by small local artisans in the same numbers they once had. Larger bicycle companies had gradually caught up in terms of quality and performance while also benefiting from industrial scale, marketing power, sponsorship, and global manufacturing systems.

Over roughly twenty years, many of the small independent builders who had once formed part of Britain’s ordinary cycling culture found themselves pushed steadily towards the margins.

By the early 2000s, that process had largely reached its conclusion.

Cycling also became increasingly shaped by marketing and measurable performance claims. Weight, stiffness, aerodynamics, and racing success became powerful commercial tools within an industry that constantly needed consumers to believe the next product represented meaningful progress over the last one.

In some cases, genuine improvements certainly existed. But over time, the culture surrounding bicycles also became increasingly tied to cycles of replacement and technological churn which sat uneasily beside older workshop traditions built around longevity, repair, and continuity.

In fact, I suspect many newer cyclists no longer even realise this world exists, or ever existed at all. They are several generations removed from the workshop culture which once sat much closer to the centre of British cycling life.

And yet I still cling to it. Partly because it is simply what I know. But also because, deep down, I still believe there is something valuable in a culture organised around repair, continuity, and care rather than endless replacement.

Why Handmade Frames Were Marginalised

I am obviously not neutral when it comes to craft. But generally speaking, when choosing things in my own life, I tend to value objects which are durable, repairable, and made as locally as possible.

They still have to function well, of course. But beyond a certain point, I find myself caring less about optimisation and more about longevity, maintainability, and the relationship I build with the object over time.

When it comes to bicycles, those instincts remain much the same. If the performance advantages of the latest carbon fibre racing bicycle were truly transformative for most riders, perhaps I would feel differently. But if we are honest, for the overwhelming majority of people, the differences are relatively marginal outside elite competition.

And yet handmade steel frames now occupy only a tiny corner of the cycling world.

That raises an interesting question. If these bicycles are still durable, comfortable, repairable, adaptable, and capable of lasting for decades, why did they become so culturally marginal?

The same pattern exists across many forms of craft production.

One might assume these objects disappeared simply because they became too expensive for ordinary people. But that explanation only goes so far. In the case of bicycle frames, handmade steel bicycles often occupy surprisingly similar price points to many mass-produced alternatives. The same can be true of well-made leather boots, furniture, or other durable goods.

What changed was not simply affordability, but culture, visibility, marketing, and the values surrounding consumption itself.

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The Bicycle Is Already One of Humanity’s Great Technologies

It is difficult today to imagine rarely travelling far from where you were born, but for most of human history that was the ordinary reality for most people.

You worked locally, married locally, raised children locally, and often died not far from where you began. Your world might extend only a few miles in any direction.

So what finally broke down this barrier for ordinary people?

The railways undoubtedly transformed mobility during the nineteenth century, connecting towns and cities in ways previous generations could scarcely imagine. But for working and lower middle class people, no technology expanded everyday personal freedom quite like the bicycle.

Unlike the railway, the bicycle required no timetable, no ticket, and no fixed route. Once owned, it gave ordinary people independent mobility at almost no ongoing cost.

Unlike the motor car, the bicycle achieves this with remarkably few wider social and environmental costs. It is extraordinarily energy efficient, mechanically elegant, and resource light. That may be one reason why, despite wave after wave of technological change, the bicycle still remains deeply relevant to our collective future.

In many ways, this is exactly why traditional framebuilding sits so naturally alongside the bicycle philosophically. The craft evolved around the same principles that make the bicycle itself such an enduring technology: efficiency, repairability, longevity, adaptability, and relatively modest use of energy and materials.

Handmade steel framebuilding is also comparatively low energy and resource light when set against many forms of modern industrial manufacture. And perhaps most importantly, repair and long-term reuse were always built into the culture of the craft itself.

It could be argued that the bicycle had already reached something close to an equilibrium of design before industrial manufacturing truly began optimising beyond traditional craft methods.

New materials and production systems have certainly improved certain narrow performance metrics, particularly around weight, stiffness, and aerodynamic efficiency. But many of these gains have also introduced trade-offs elsewhere within the wider human and material system surrounding the bicycle.

Increasing manufacturing complexity often brings higher energy use, shorter product cycles, reduced repairability, greater dependence on global supply chains, and the erosion of local skilled labour. In many cases, industrial optimisation also fragments work itself, separating people from the fuller sense of judgement, responsibility, and material understanding once embedded within craft production.

So I find myself wondering whether craft production is truly obsolete at all. Or whether modern societies have simply spent decades prioritising forms of manufacturing which optimise for scale and efficiency while gradually eroding other things that matter: sustainability, repairability, meaningful work, and long-term human flourishing.

What Framebuilding Preserves

One of the framebuilders I most admire left school at fourteen with no qualifications and the feeling that he was, to put it mildly, something of an underachiever.

Fortunately, his father was a talented framebuilder who ran his own workshop, and he told his son: “You’re not hanging around the streets. You’re coming to work with me.”

That was the beginning of a career, a craft, and ultimately an adult identity built around skill, judgement, and responsibility.

And that is partly the point.

Today, someone like him might easily struggle within a modern education system increasingly organised around academic performance and credentialism. But in the 1970s, there were still visible pathways into skilled adult life for young people whose intelligence expressed itself differently.

Because how can we seriously describe somebody who has built thousands of bicycle frames, drawing upon years of apprenticeship, accumulated judgement, material understanding, and practical problem-solving, as unintelligent?

Today, this same framebuilder is well known within the cycling world. His work is admired across generations of riders and builders alike.

But age catches all of us eventually. He now lives with severely reduced kidney function and would have every excuse to step away from the workshop entirely. Yet he still continues building frames.

And I think that reveals something important about crafts like this. They are rarely just jobs performed purely for money. Over time, they become bound up with identity, judgement, usefulness, routine, and a person’s understanding of themselves in the world.

Craft at this level is not simply employment. It becomes a way of seeing, thinking, and relating to other people through work.

I suspect this matters far more to human fulfilment than modern societies sometimes recognise.

When I first heard this story, it struck me just how much craft is passed from one generation to another.

During my own apprenticeship, my mentor could be deeply unforgiving at times. But in hindsight, I understand why. He was not simply teaching me how to file a lug or braze a joint. He was trying to instil standards of judgement and workmanship that eventually become inseparable from your own sense of integrity.

Even now, there are shortcuts I could take which most customers would probably never notice. But it would still feel wrong somehow, as though the ghosts of my mentors were standing behind me quietly disapproving.

And that is something many people misunderstand about craft traditions. We are not simply clinging sentimentally to obsolete methods or resisting change for the sake of it. Good craftspeople adapt constantly. Tools evolve. Materials evolve. Techniques evolve.

But standards matter. Care matters. Responsibility matters.

So when economic systems increasingly reward scale, speed, disposability, and churn over longevity, repair, and smallness, craftspeople are not merely being stubborn when they resist some of those pressures. In many cases, they are trying to remain faithful to ethical standards passed from one generation of makers to the next.

This is by no means unique to framebuilding. Versions of this culture once existed across countless trades and crafts.

But are we still offering younger generations meaningful pathways into this kind of work? Certainly not in any great abundance, nor evenly distributed across the country.

Does the modern education system meaningfully guide young people towards these worlds? Are there still enough visible role models through whom a teenager can realistically imagine a coherent path into skilled adult life?

I suspect most of us already know the answer.

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Affordable Craftsmanship and the Disappearing Middle

The death of the high street is a modern paradox, but it’s not really a mystery.

At one time you could walk through the centre of almost any town and find examples of affordable craftsmanship everywhere: tailors, cobblers, bicycle makers, furniture workshops, repair shops.

These were not luxury businesses serving elites. They were ordinary parts of everyday economic life.

Now craftsmanship is increasingly presented as something rare, expensive, and exclusive. A luxury experience for affluent consumers rather than a normal feature of society.

When was the last time you bought something craft made instead of mass produced?

But then what is the alternative?

Over time we have lost many of these local alternatives to mass production because our economic system increasingly rewards businesses that can scale, standardise, and reduce labour costs.

Craft made goods work against that logic. They are often designed to last for decades, to be repaired, altered, maintained, and passed on. A well made pair of boots is not supposed to fall apart after two years. A steel bicycle frame can be repainted, repaired, and ridden for generations.

From the perspective of consumer culture, this is inefficient. Durable goods reduce churn. They slow replacement cycles. They encourage maintenance rather than disposal.

But for many traditional craft businesses, that was never a contradiction. The bootmaker earned money selling new boots, but also repairing old ones. The bicycle shop sold complete bicycles, but also maintained them for decades afterwards. The relationship was ongoing rather than extractive.

What disappeared was not just a way of making things, but a different understanding of what an economy is for.

The modern system increasingly rewards throughput, volume, and planned obsolescence. Older workshop economies were often built around continuity, reputation, repair, and long term relationships with customers.

That is why so many traditional high streets once contained repair shops, workshops, and small manufacturers alongside retailers. They were part of a local economic ecology where durability still made sense.

Today we increasingly produce things that are difficult to repair, uneconomical to maintain, or deliberately disposable. We call this progress because prices fall and convenience rises. But the hidden cost is the disappearance of skilled local work, material knowledge, and the idea that ordinary people should own things built to endure.

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Closing Reflection: The Light Still On in the Workshop

Let me try to sum up everything I’ve been talking about here with a story about one of my recent customers.

A few months ago, a Scottish gentleman visited the workshop carrying a bright red Ellis Briggs frame covered in old touring stickers. He needed a small repair to the rear dropouts, nothing especially dramatic in itself. But as we talked about bicycles, touring, and people we knew in common within the cycling world, he gradually began telling me the story behind the frame.

It had originally belonged to a close friend of his who had since passed away. Before his death, his friend had told him that when the time came, he wanted him to have the frame, on the condition that he returned it once he no longer needed it himself.

Unfortunately, relations with the man’s widow later became difficult, and my customer was not even invited to the funeral. But the frame mattered so much to him that he continued writing to her over a long period of time asking whether he could still have it. Eventually, she agreed.

And as I stood there holding this battered old frame in my hands, I found myself wondering why it mattered so much.

After all, millions of bicycle frames exist in the world. Why this one?

Then he told me another part of the story.

Years earlier, while staying in a youth hostel, he had met a young woman travelling. Somehow, between them, they arrived at an idea which now sounds almost absurdly romantic: they would ride bicycles together from Britain all the way to Australia.

And this was the frame he rode there on.

Holding that frame while listening to his story filled me with an immense sense of pride. Not because I had built it myself, but because it had been built by my own mentor, a man who helped guide me from a confused teenager into adult life through the workshop and everything it contained.

And suddenly the frame no longer seemed like a mere object at all.

Inside it lived friendships, journeys, apprenticeships, stories, judgement, memories, and decades of accumulated skill passed quietly from one pair of hands to another.

Of course, people can form deep attachments to all kinds of objects, including mass-produced ones. Memory and meaning are not exclusive to craft.

But what struck me here was something slightly different. This frame had not only survived physically. It had returned, decades later, to the same workshop from which it originally emerged.

The person telling me its story understood what the frame was, who had built it, and why that history mattered. And I, standing there repairing it, was connected through apprenticeship and shared craft lineage to the very person who had originally brazed it together many years earlier.

In that moment, the workshop no longer felt like a mere place of retail or manufacture. It felt more like part of a continuing cultural memory carried quietly through objects, skills, stories, and relationships between people.

Modern marketing often tries to imitate this feeling through branding, nostalgia, and manufactured authenticity. But standing there holding that old frame in my hands, the feeling which struck me was something much deeper and much more human than that.

In many ways, that is what crafts like framebuilding still preserve.

Not simply old techniques or obsolete traditions, but continuity between people, places, generations, and ways of living that modern society increasingly struggles to value properly.

These workshops are not perfect. Nor are they frozen in time.

But they are still alive.

I was once told that sentimentality has no place in business.

But standing there listening to that story, I found myself wondering whether we may have misunderstood something important.

Because perhaps some forms of attachment are not weaknesses at all. Perhaps they are part of what encourages people to repair rather than discard, preserve rather than replace, and carry objects, skills, and stories forward through time.