Pashley Cycles celebrated its 90th anniversary this year with a ride and picnic through the quaint environs of Stratford Upon Avon. As the participants dressed up in vintage clothing on their retro bikes and took tea and cake in an old fashioned English marquee, you could be forgiven for thinking that this is a backward looking company, desperately clinging on to the vestiges of a time gone by.

But as Adrian Williams their MD, told me on my visit to their factory, “Don’t judge the book by its cover. Open it up and you’ll find that there’s a lot more to us than that.” And in the course of my afternoon there I can say that what I found was, yes, a British company with a rich heritage that does indeed play on the romance of the past. But there’s a lot more to Pashley than that: here’s that rare breed indeed, a British manufacturer that’s winning, expanding and building on its reputation as both a bike builder for the leisure cyclist, and a supplier to business. Pashley, after all, have just won the contract to supply a whole new fleet of ‘Boris’ bikes and beaten some much larger players in the process.