In this Shop Visit, Petor Georgallou profiles London framebuilder Rob Quirk of Quirk Cycles and explores the realities of building contemporary custom bicycles in the UK. Join their discussion of 3D-printed parts, framebuilding as an art practice, life after the Bicycle Academy, and much, much more. Read on…

It’s been almost eight years since I moved out of London, and no part of me misses life there. But every time I need to dip in for some reason, I indulge my nostalgia for a past life by cycling the same roads and eating the same foods I ate a decade earlier. It’s fun for a day or two.

Upon a recent visit to the city, I stopped at Prufrock on Leather Lane, which still serves the best coffee in London despite becoming an inhospitable pompous hellhole that offers table service where once there was considered interior design and a space to lean your bike up inside the cafe. I ate a burrito at Daddy Donkey, the only good burrito the UK offers. I stopped and said hi to Stuart at Bikefix, London’s weirdest and second-oldest bike shop, which has moved into its own back room with access from an alleyway off Lambs Conduit Street, where their shopfront displayed recumbents and Moultons and Bromptons for decades before.

Like all cities, London is becoming an amalgam of rampant luxury, chain eateries, and back alley necessities. While it has significantly degraded in the last 20 years, this city still has a healthy and relentless churn, which makes it less recognizable with each visit despite the few remaining oases of my nostalgia. Riding past Condor, London’s oldest bike shop, I see a face I recognize: billboard-scale Rob Quirk printed on a translucent banner that fills the frame of Condor’s shop window, looking not directly at me but slightly off to the side, half grinning under mild exertion while climbing a hill in the Hebrides. Rob is so traditionally handsome that it’s almost surprising his billboard-sized face doesn’t crop up around London more often, selling Gillette razors or men’s hair dye. Incidentally, I would visit Rob in his Hackney Wick workshop while riding the Suprachub that I had on loan to review.

Rob and I both started building frames at around the same time, both of us having graduated from the Bicycle Academy. After a couple of years of riding past each other, our relationship grew from a wary side-eye at the competition, to a wave, to looking forward to hanging out occasionally. Looking back, we were both ridiculous. While I flunked out of framebuilding to fiddle around with cameras and bike shows, Rob just got very good at building bikes.

Over the last decade, Rob has reached a level of building which I think relatively few builders in the UK acheive. Quirk has quietly plowed through his 10,000 hours and can comfortably build a frame to an incredibly high standard on autopilot. That’s what he’s doing while I poke around his workshop chatting about nonsense and gossip.

Quirk of London

It’s easy to fetishize being a builder in London in 2024 as being a simple craftsperson and entrepreneur who occasionally gets dressed up in a white Rapha mechanic’s shirt for a photoshoot in their workshop. But the reality of being a builder in the UK right now, let alone in London, is relentlessly fucking brutal. It’s not “challenging” or “tricky” – it’s fucking brutal, and it’s a climate I can’t unsee or choose not to acknowledge while retaining any semblance of dignity as a journalist. In spite of the relaxed and competent Rob (who’s by no means a fabrication for my benefit), I also see my friend Rob Quirk, who is on a deeper level far more impressive and relevant in their contribution to the craft.

Rob is quietly neurotic; every time we hang out, there’s an undertone of frustration and a genuine curiosity bubbling beneath the surface that never seems to stop trying to make sense of things and refine them to logic or function. Not just bikes, but everything: bikes, culture, processes. Everything. Rob notices details and nuance, and he seems to be constantly working internally to refine those things and improve on them. I can’t imagine Rob sleeping ever – but I’d wager that if he does, his dreams look like framebuilding, and that’s how and why Quirk produces some of the best-looking and nicest-riding bikes in the UK at the moment.

I say to Rob, “I literally can’t believe that you’re somehow successfully running a framebuilding business in London.”

He replies, “Being in London has been a huge benefit to my company, especially in the early days. I don’t think that a lot of people think of London as being a cycling city, but there is so much going on here and so many great cycling communities. A lot of my customers are London-based, but being in London has been so good for my international customers, too, because it’s so well-connected. For now, I will be sticking around here.”

The Craft and the Art and the History

Before transitioning his practice to framebuilding, Rob was an artist, working as part of a collaborative practice called No Fixed Abode. Rob recalls:

“Initially we started out exploring contemporary expressions of folk activity. We defined that as essentially any grassroots activity or art form that wasn’t commercialized or disseminated widely. As we dug down into this, the research led us into exploring tensions between public and private space in the built environment. A favorite project of mine: we built a house in one night on Alexanderplatz in Berlin. This was inspired by a ‘folk law’ that if you could build a house on common land between sunset and sunrise and have smoke issuing from the chimney, then you would gain the right to that land. Although in reality it had no legal standing, the practice was observed, particularly in Wales. We wanted to pull this ancient practice and transplant it into the modern city of Berlin, and test the boundaries of public space.

We built a house with the help of our assembled community, and had smoke coming out the chimney – it was pretty wild. As the art practice developed we became more and more interested in the built environment and the production of space. Eventually this led me down the path of studying for an MA at Goldsmiths in Research Architecture. The plan was to continue into a PhD, and although I really enjoyed the emphasis on theory in this work, I really missed working with my hands, which is what led me down the path to where I am today.

In one sense, what I am doing now as a framebuilder is the polar opposite of what I spent a good chunk of my life training for. Running a commercial business would appear diametrically at odds, but at its heart framebuilding still represents for me this ideal of grassroots folk activity – the craft and the art and the history all speak to me.”

Quirk Cycles Shop Visit

Rob’s frames, on the face of it, are pretty conservative in their design, but his building practice focuses creatively on refinement of the process, rather than refinement on a per-frame basis. It’s a body of work, rather than individual unrelated works, and over the years Quirk has refined the practice to a series of acutely customizable, purpose-led models, rather than a new design for each customer. It’s a delicate balance of building something unique and personal each time but on the basis of a proven theory, or geometry refined over time. I think this inquisitiveness and unrest about even the most basic details stems from treating framebuilding like a fine art practice, where being an artist is a mode of thinking rather than a profession. While framebuilding is Rob’s profession, bikes have become a mode of being rather than a job.

As Rob puts it:

“It was actually living in Berlin working on the one-night-house project that cycling really became a big part of my life. Berlin is such a great city to cycle in and riding a bike really changes how you move through and experience a city. Similarly when I moved to London, cycling completely transformed how I interacted with the city – but it wasn’t until I started building that I felt I found my place in cycling. At the time, the whole market was heavily influenced by pro cycling and selling consumers the gear and equipment that the top pro teams used. For a lot of people, myself included, this just didn’t make a lot of sense. The type of riders we were or the type or riding we were doing had very little in common with that level of the sport, so often we were sold an ideal that was incompatible with reality.

It was around this time that I came across Mike Hall and the Transcontinental Race. That was back when the race started in London, and barely 30 people would be on the start line. There was something about the race and its ethos that spoke to me and something just clicked. All at once harking back to a time when the Grand Tours were as much about self-supported endurance, but simultaneously appealing to a modern rider who craved for challenges that required more than just speed. I was hooked and hit upon the idea that these ultra events would be the perfect test bed for the bikes I wanted to design. So I signed up and raced my first ultra, the Transcontinental Race No.4. This snowballed into more ultras, more off-road, more gravel, and became as much a lifestyle as a work methodology for my bike design.”

Mode Switch

In his first year exhibiting at Bespoked in 2016, Quirk won three awards. Although the bikes of 2016 were very different in both design and aesthetic, few independent builders have experienced a more positive and solid start to their career. It was a year of bold graphics and metallic fades – however, thankfully, the Quirk aesthetic has (just like the build process) been refined and become extremely intricate and considered, with some of the best-designed and -executed paints I’ve ever seen, varying in their degrees of complexity, from the humble powdercoat on the Suprachub I’d been riding to the insanely complex and wildly ambitious paint schemes by Cole Coatings and Jack Kingston that have adorned Quirk frames over the past few years.

“I look back with fondness on what I managed to achieve in those early days. Before I was building, I was a music promoter putting on weird folk and neo-psych bands in odd little venues,” says Rob. “The DIY music scene had a very special ethos and design aesthetic and so when I started Quirk Cycles, I was really guided by this aesthetic and really wanted to make something that was bold and dynamic, something that had personality. My first logo was drawn up by Lisa O’Hara, an amazing illustrator in Sheffield whose aesthetic and background in gig posters really resonated with me and I wanted to instill that into my bikes.

It felt different and edgy at the time and the bold primary colors and hand-drawn aesthetic bled their way into the paint jobs of my first builds. As Quirk Cycles has grown, and as I matured, so did my aesthetic, and with it I started to really embrace finishes that had greater depth and luster. Now with my finishes, I focus on the qualities of the materials I use and their natural character. Similarly this is explored through paint with techniques such as marbling which relies on the innate quality of oil versus water-based pigments to create unpredictable patterns, or the use of gold and silver leaf where not one piece will look like the next. For me, this exploration of process and material alongside graphic structure is how I trained as an artist.”

Quirk continues:

“I started working with 3D-printed parts back in 2018 and could see how the additive manufacturing process was going to revolutionize framebuilding, especially for smaller companies. Previously if a builder wanted to have some proprietary dropouts or other parts made for their frames, the only real options were machining or casting. Casting is almost always out of the question due to the large minimum order quantity, although some builders make it work, whereas machining is more practical but the process limits what can be achieved. There were numerous design issues I wanted to solve by using a 3D-printed dropout such as improved build time, superior alignment, weight savings, and better stress distribution. Just as importantly, though, I wanted to develop a part that not only looked good but was unique to Quirk Cycles’ brand aesthetics.

As the years went on I added more parts to the frames that provided their own unique design solutions. The seat cluster allowed me to build using straight skinny stays for improved compliance and ride comfort, increased tire clearance, and improved alignment. It also allowed me to integrate a seat clamp into my frames, removing my reliance on aftermarket parts, but also building on the premium Quirk aesthetic. The head tube brought cable integration to my stainless frames in a way that didn’t compromise on headset choice or head tube material.”

The Bicycle Academy

The process at Quirk Cycles is now a far cry from the shared beginnings of many of the UK’s builders, at the superb but no longer trading Bicycle Academy, where Rob returned as an alumni to teach for a while.

“I can’t speak more highly of the Bicycle Academy and the continued influence it had on my life, not just as a builder, but really holistically. These guys did more than just teach you how to braze a bike frame together. TBA occupied this position in the landscape of modern-day working practice that spoke to and transcended notions of craft labor, and gaining meaning through work. The long list of framebuilder alumni who passed through and taught there is a who’s who of the most influential names in the new wave of bicycle building. What TBA did was build a community of builders, and it is this community that has helped shape what myself and many others do today.”

State of the Art

I ask, “The cycling industry for independent builders has always been challenging, but with the post-pandemic absolute lunacy and politically the UK being so fucked, how have you managed to continue to thrive in spite of literally everything?”

“There’s been a lot of economic shockwaves felt in the industry with the UK exiting the EU,” Rob answers. “I was concerned that a big part of my market would turn their back on us. Last year I made a concerted effort to focus on bike shows in Europe (Bespoked Dresden, DT Swiss Craft Bike Days), and the gamble paid off with a big boost to sales to the EU. I’m now also partnered with the amazing Light Wolf Studio in Dresden who will be handling EU orders. I think the journey of Quirk has been one of incremental gains where I have slowly chipped away at building an amazing product that is respected in the industry. It’s taken a lot of work to get here and there’s still a long way to go, but you know, slow and steady.”

I’m almost as envious of Rob’s stamina as I am his hairline. Quirk as a company has seemingly relentlessly marched forward refining the process of building to the point where building is the easy part, allowing Rob to focus on the process of building and experience of owning a Quirk. Recently Quirk has begun offering build experiences where customers can come and build their own Quirk alongside Rob on a one-to-one basis, offering an even more intimate relationship with a new bike as a customer.

Stay tuned for my review of the Suprachub, Quirk’s drop bar 29” gravel adventure platform which I lived with for a few months, as well as Josh Weinberg’s review of his DIY Mamtor all-road bike.