[1] Brompton has now produced well over 1.100,000 bicycles and in 2008 achieved 25,000 units for export to markets such as the Netherlands, America, Germany, Japan and Scandinavia.

[6] A Cambridge engineering graduate, Ritchie was working as a landscape gardener in London when, in 1976, he conceived the idea for a folding bike, which he subsequently named after the Brompton Oratory.

[2] After devoting his life to the development and manufacture of the bike, he began to step back from the day-to-day running of the company in 2005, reduced his shareholding, and now acts as Technical Director.

[8] After graduating in engineering from Trinity College,[9] Cambridge, in 1968,[2] Ritchie worked as a computer programmer for Elliott Automation which subsequently became part of Marconi.

[3] In the mid-1970s his father, a stockbroker, introduced him to Bill Ingram and the Bickerton bike, which in turn triggered his own ideas for a folding bicycle.

'Two more prototypes were built in the bedroom of his flat overlooking Brompton Oratory in South Kensington, London – hence the bike's name.

[2][3][6] An additional £10,000 equity raised from friends, relatives and Brompton owners launched the company properly in 1986,[3] and he eventually secured £100,000 to set up a better-equipped factory under a Brentford railway arch in 1987.

The bike probably would have been dumbed down and cheapened.Volume production was difficult and demand outstripped the factory's capacity, so it expanded into a second railway arch in 1994 and again in 1998 into the Chiswick premises it occupied until moving to Greenford in 2016.