Brooks B17

A Brooks B17 arrives as hard as a new shoe. It is a single piece of thick vegetable-tanned leather, soaked, pressed into a broad pear shape and stretched like a hammock over a steel frame, with a tensioning bolt at the nose and a row of rivets around the back. At 275 millimetres long and 175 wide it is a touring saddle, cut for long days rather than racing. Over the first few hundred miles the leather takes the shape of the person sitting on it, and from then on the saddle is theirs.

John Boultbee Brooks was a Birmingham harness maker. The company's story is that when his horse died he took to a bicycle, found its wooden saddle unbearable and made himself a leather one. Whatever the truth of that, he patented his first bicycle saddle in 1882, and by 1898 the B17 was in the Brooks catalogue; one account puts it on sale ten years earlier. It has outlasted every fashion in cycling since, the racing saddles, the plastic shells, the gel, and it remains the company's best seller.

For most of the twentieth century Brooks belonged to Raleigh, and it nearly went down with it. When Raleigh collapsed in 1999 Brooks went into liquidation, and two buyers, John Macnaughtan and Adrian Williams, took it on to keep the saddles in England. In 2002 they sold it to Selle Royal, an Italian saddle maker that has left the making where it was.

That is a factory in Smethwick, on the western edge of Birmingham, where the saddles are made on machines dating back to the nineteenth century, with hand work at every stage. The only care a B17 asks for is a turn of the tensioning bolt as the leather settles, and a rub of Proofide, the company's dressing of waxes and oils, a few times while it breaks in and every few months after.