Over the past few years I’ve seen two ancient bicycles parked in various locations near my house. The first appears, from the markings on the frame, to be called a Superstyle Sport. The second is made by Hero bicycles and the model is branded “Jet”, even though it’s about as jet-like as the other is sporty. Both are sedate, sit-up-and-beg-style bikes of the kind once ridden by policemen, or by Paul New-man (with Katharine Ross sitting on the handlebars) in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.

As cycling has turned narcissistic and fetishistic, I became increasingly admiring of the owners of those bikes. Many cyclists, it seems, aspire to be regarded as iconoclastic. They live on the edge; they pursue extremes. They pedal frenetically about on bikes offering dual handlebars, facilitating “advanced racing position” or “super advanced”, even though they only ever use their bikes to go to the pub. Or people ride bikes stripped of everything, like the clown’s bike in the circus when all the bits have fallen off.

Still dominant, of course, are the chunky mountain bikes, which are ridden up mountains as often as off-road cars are ridden off-road (ie, never). But a reaction is setting in, and I have begun to see many more bikes like the Superstyle Sport and the Hero Jet: sensible bikes, less likely to be ridden by a muscular youth with some high-performance “recovery gel” smeared on his lips than a chap with a pipe between his teeth. “It’s a retro nod,” says Andrew Brabazon, event manager of the Earls Court cycle show (open to the public between October 12 and 14), “and it is a trend. People seem to want to have bikes like the kind they saw when they were kids.”

A company called Velorbis will be exhibiting the latest in its range of “elegant, classic bicycles” at the show. The firm is Danish (the sit-up-and-beg has always been popular in Northern Europe), but its models have Anglophile names, and are described in fogeyish, fascinatingly non-PC language: “Our Victoria, the ladies’ model, takes its curvilinear shape from the subtle, smooth lines of the female form.” While “Church-ill, our classic gents’ model, reflects the sturdy, muscular contours of the male physique . . .”

The (very) English firm Pashley, which has been building its own bicycles in Stratford-upon-Avon since 1926, is also benefiting from the reaction against gimmickry. “Our sales have increased beyond recognition in the past four years,” a spokesman said. “In the 1980s and 1990s cycling became hip and trendy but, you see, ladies don’t want a mountain bike.” Pashley offers instead its Pashley Princess, perfect for old maids cycling to evensong – or younger ones heading for a lecture at Girton – with a frame that is “traditionally lugged and brazed” (commendably old-fashioned verbs even if I don’t know what they mean), fitted rear skirt guard, chain guard, dynamo and, perhaps, a puncture repair outfit kept in the front basket in a dusty old lozenge tin.

Note that skirt guard. These are bikes that you can ride in your ordinary clothes. They wouldn’t go with the Lycra shorts in which so many middle-aged cyclists like to show off the precise delineation of their bottoms. Incidentally, I once saw a bit of research on a TV programme which demonstrated that the rider in figure-hugging gear has a speed advantage of (if memory serves) 0.001 per cent over a man in a three-piece tweed suit.

The popularity of bikes that you can ride in smart clothes is probably connected to an increase in commuting by bicycle, which seems to be happening across the country in response to traffic congestion and environmental concerns, and which accounts for a good part of the 83 per cent increase in cycling in London since 2000.

With the sit-up-and-beg, the bike serves your life rather than the other way round. There’s also an aesthetic pleasure to riding in that upright position. The ride seems to glide serenely. According to Andy Shrimpton, who runs Cycle Heaven in York and imports increasing numbers of Gazelle bikes, which are Dutch sit-up-and-begs, “the handlebars sweep towards you, and there are lovely, lazy angles in the frame’s construction so that the bike wants to go straight ahead rather than being all twitchy like a bike designed for speed”.

Shrimpton concedes that the bike he rides is not a sit-up-and-beg but a road bike – the irritating new name for a racer (it implies that riding a bike on a road is somehow a minority specialisation). I too ride a road bike because I know I wouldn’t get up and down the steep hills around my house in North London on a sit-up-and-beg. Even their most ardent advocates agree that the weight of the bikes, and the riding posture, make them hard to get up hills. Another disadvantage might be the cost: you won’t buy a new generation of sit-up-and-beg bike for much less than £400.

But if it weren’t for Highgate Hill I’d have one, if only to inhabit a bicycling world from which all fatuous euphemism has been banished, a world in which you speak of oil and not “lube”, bicycle clips and not trouser bands, tyres and inner tubes and not top tubes and down tubes, a world in which a spirit of elegance once again attaches to mankind’s finest invention.

www.pashley.co.uk; www.velorbis.co.uk; www.cycle-heaven.co.uk

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