A Bespoked Apocalypse

New to Bespoked this year was a challenge to create an “apocalypse-ready” bike. Free to presenting builders and booths at the show and sponsored by Brother Cycles who subsidized entries and provided frames to some of the entrants, what the apocalyptic component of Bespoked UK 2025 ended up serving attendees was as much about a theoretical idea of the apocalypse as it was the actual builds. With the bike industry, and perhaps industry at large, being a confusing, harrowing, uncertain place in early 2025, the nature of an Apocalypse Build-Off was on the nose.

As I pulled up for another day of tens of thousands of steps, handshakes, bike shots, and conversations, a haggard organizer Petor Georgallou whipped up next to me. He was riding one of two Hey Susans, his former framebuilding venture, and the other was temporarily going to be mine. I’d borrowed it the day before for the sake of a quick morning retreat to a local specialty coffee shop in central Manchester. Being a former coffee industry person, I do a solid job of sniffing out the better cafes when traveling, and Fort Coffee had done the trick for me just a day before. With a lovely breakfast and one of the better batch-brewed anaerobic naturals I’ve had, I sought out another quick cup before the madness started up again.

“What are you doing?” Petor asked in his agreeable but jarring tone.

“Oh, I’m just going for a cup of coffee and breakfast. I’ll bring you one if you like,” I said, half joking.

I could see the look in his eyes. It was both energized and shaken. The toll of organizing one of the largest and, dare I say, best bike shows on this side of the pond was taking its toll.

“Okay, I’ll come with you. How far away is it?”

And just like that, we were off. With Google Maps loudly directing me, we rolled down the beautiful corridors of Manchester and away from a crowd of staffers and organizers who had already started asking questions. As I followed his wayward wheel, perhaps skirting a traffic law or two, I remembered the words I’d heard him say in an interview from one of the films the night before. Frankenbiking, a lovely film about tall bikes and their place in the cycling diaspora, played a to-camera interview in the post credit scene where Petor detailed an incident he’d had while tall bike jousting.

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“We’d set these plastic dolls on fire and jousted at one another. I got him and looked back, and I suppose burning plastic turns into a sort of napalm. So, he was on the floor with lit, liquid plastic all over his mid section. They eventually put it out, but he has a bunch of scars and burn marks on his chest now… I suppose nearly killing someone is similar to actually killing them because that has really stuck with me,” the interview trailed off. As I mindlessly followed Petor through the intersections and thoroughfares of a city I’d never meaningfully spent time in, I hazily recalled those words. Nevertheless, we eventually got to riding alongside each other.

“How are people going to get to the show today with all this going on?” I asked. The first two days of the show went off with relative ease, but Sunday had a monkey wrench thrown into it. The Manchester Marathon was taking place, and most of the city streets, including those leading to Victoria Baths, were shut down.

“I don’t know. They probably won’t, and we’ll lose a load of money that we don’t have,” he said, somewhat nonchalantly.

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It’s not that he didn’t care, rather that he knew their wasn’t much to be done. As we tuckered into breakfast, he meandered through both the realities of the show and his origins in cycling. “After the fixie boom in 2008, when all the rich kids went back to their hedge fund jobs and whatnot, that’s when it was really fun.” He spoke about his interest in cycling and how he got involved in the “business” of show organizing. “There’s so much more fun in the bust, man. When there isn’t a load of money to be made. Surrounded by people who are just doing something for the sake of doing it, not because they’re trying to get rich. That’s why I like these things. But we’re on the brink of societal and economic collapse it seems. What do you do then?” He laughed. It was authentic and real. The cacophonous sounds of a person who had every reason to be doing something else but instead did this.

We continued chatting, and eventually I said something that set him off.

“There’s always one…”

Petor was chastising me for the role I’d played in the award ceremony on the first day.

“I mean, most innovative? You chose the least innovative one. What the f*** was that, man!? Even Konstantin was like…”

I’d awarded Konstantin Drust’s prototype production gravel bike “most innovative” the first day of the show. As he playfully mocked my choice, he made a quizzical face looking off onto the street. Listen, I couldn’t argue with him. I understood it was an out of left field answer, but I stand behind it. Thinking about bikes as Konstantin does is innovative. Anyways, I digress.

“Any of your runner-ups would’ve been better. Any of them. Literally.”

I laughed along with him.

“Well, at least no one got hurt. Actually, I guess, that one guy who hit the jump wrong. But, he seemed fine. Even better, he was hurt, but not too much. Just a little blood to get things going,” I said.

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The day before was another slog of handshakes and bike shots. Of people pushing their passions as best they could. Vehicles served as embodiments of hopes and dreams. Ideas incarnate in a world gone mad. People continuing, much like Petor was, despite all signs signaling toward other, more viable ends. Delving into the deep side of the madness, Brother Cycles had sponsored a “race” with the Apocalypse Build-Off bikes people submitted. While Petor’s description of the final submissions was, “Well, we’re just going to see which of you is least disqualified,” those who lined up were certainly something to marvel at.

The most impressive to look at was Jonathan from Tomo Bikes’ entry. A bike he had to add couplers to in order to actually get it out of his house, this mess of tubes, chains, and cobbled-together bits is like a Mad Max version of the functional tall bikes Tomo creates for paying customers. Fitting the apocalypse remit on aesthetic alone, he struggled to clear most of the course give the wide turning radius and the sheer size of the bike. Still, he gave it a good whack.

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As the smoke from fireworks filled the air, children screamed, and a man with a Lime bike carrying heirloom beans in it nearly ran me over, I stopped and wondered how this could ever be work.

Folding his eggs, Petor chimed in, “I think if I hadn’t bought it, it would’ve just become a trade show that ran its course and died some years ago. But, I wanted to do something a little different. As a framebuilder, it had become such an established part of my yearly routine. The nature of building bikes is lonely. You are constantly subjected to how little people value your work. Sharing in how little people value the work of building bikes with other people is quite nice. So, I wanted to continue that.”

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“But it’s hard. Everything is loads of money we don’t have. I’ve taken out of my own pockets to pay for things this time around. And everything is very uncertain now with the tariffs. Things are really rough,” he added.

It felt like watching your parents tell you they had to put down your childhood dog. Understanding even a modicum of the economic hardship event holders like Petor face in today’s wayward bike market is the grim side of the business that is the bike industry. However, as I gazed upon Sentient’s first foray into framebuilding while lifting a makeshift hurdle so their rider could duck underneath, narrowly grazing the likely uninsured onlookers just a few inches away, I felt like I was simultaneously aware of the entire spectrum. The fresh-faced fun this kind of show inspires and the cold, hard truth of what it is to actually pay for it all.

As Petor mentioned, contestants in the Apocalypse Build-Off had taken their own approach to their entries. To their credit, Sentient—a B2B distributor for Omnium in the UK—had actually followed the rules. Their cargo-style rig wasn’t a cobbled together decoration but a legitimate entry into the contest. Per Tullen Dawson, “The frame design came from taking the largest diameter Reynolds 525 tube we could get our hands on to simulate a scaffold pole, though it is 1mm single-butted wall thickness, far lighter than scaffold! We had to redesign and fabricate the frame fixture to allow us to build something so long, and with two steerer tubes. So, rather than going for a three-dimensional design for the cargo bike, we thought that a 2D design might be better to store and way more adaptable as you can just mount whatever you would like to both the rear rack and cargo rack mounts. We also attached a working circular saw on the rear rack, which is pedal powered. It’s held within an ammo box, with a gearbox made from old bottom brackets and sprockets to give it enough speed to efficiently chop down firewood.”

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There was also Stayer Cycles’ cargo-style bike, which had some legitimate purpose. Like many of the bikes Stayer brought to the show, they focused on a concept specific to the company. Sam Taylor told me of their desire to recycle old bikes, like this former Kona, into cargo bikes people could really use and that came at a lower cost than other options on the market. With some prototyping seen in various and bits and bobs on their Apocalypse Build-Off rig, like the fork and the cargo section of the bike, this served as a loud—and I can assure you it was loud—proof of concept that signaled toward a larger idea.

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Watching Craig from 2nd Life Bikes pilot this monstrosity that quite literally couldn’t turn left in a crowded parking lot, I felt that this was the point. For the the hand-wringing over new product and precious innovation—this was it. The heart and soul of the bike industry. Somehow both ambulating it all forward by solving problems out of scraps and detritus while also having the most fun. It wasn’t stuffy, proper, or professional, it was what bikes were supposed to be: fun.

“I like surrounding myself with these kinds of people, builders, because they don’t care about the boom or the bust. They’re just always poor. So they don’t care,” Petor added.

The tragic bit is that there is a real ROI here. A removed sense of value that pops up three years down the road in the big bike shops. In the places that spend most of their time looking for the margin. But I got the sense that these folks didn’t prioritize the margin. It’s not that they didn’t care; we all have to live in this economy. It’s just that they didn’t prioritize it. I got that sentiment during my two-hour conversation with James from Craft Bikes about his concerns with doing a production bike. About how he wanted to control the experience for the sake of delivering one he could personally sign off on. I got it from speaking to Harry Major from Wizard Works about their desire to be the silliest viable brand on the market. That if they wanted to make the most logical, sensible bag for performance, they could have done so, but it wouldn’t have made sense for them. That “fun” is an actual metric they spent loads of time thinking about and not just an amorphous concept that fits nicely into a press email. I got it from Ted James, who was assembling his adjustable bottom bracket, full-suspension Pinion bike until four in the morning on the first day of the show.

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Places and spaces like Bespoked invariably hold influence in culture because people like Petor and those who help organize the event have profitability as the last checkbox on their list of things to accomplish. On our impromptu morning coffee, he shared that they hadn’t raised their entry prices once—despite the cost of pretty much everything related to putting on the show rising smoothly, now sharply—since they started organizing. He wasn’t making himself out to be a martyr, and that isn’t my goal here, either. But, after four days of seeing just how much care and effort goes into the show, I feel that perspective is warranted.

In the various industries I’ve been lucky enough to work in, there are always those who revel in the sense of togetherness. The shared camaraderie of joining in the thing it’s supposed to be centered around. In bikes, though the apocalypse of the industry seems nigh, it’s just as perilously on-track as ever. Held together by the titanic efforts of a few, the illusion of industry stability across the world seems to have always been just that—an illusion. With people like Petor leading the team at Bespoked, the thin line between us and total damnation remains.

We’ll be back tomorrow with a whole lot more from the 2025 Bespoked Manchester show. Stay tuned! In the meantime, you can dig into past coverage from previous years at our #bespoked tag, with coverage dating back to the first edition in 2019.

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