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tour de ville

tour de ville

when i first moved to islay, i tried to find what i expected to be a small township in the north of the island, travelling almost eight kilometres along a singletrack road hunting for the location marked on my ordnance survey map. sadly, i failed miserably, but happily met the folks i had been hoping to see walking towards me along said road. you see, when you're used to mainland scotland, a name on a map is generally a town or village: on islay, a name on a map guarantees nothing at all - in this case the township i thought i was looking for was, in fact, a house.

our trip to london at the beginning of this past week unwittingly placed us in a similar dilemma; off to lambs lane, hackney to visit tour de ville. jos, who lives upstairs, knew we were coming and had suggested we might like to visit on tuesday even though they are officially closed monday and tuesday. since this fitted in with our following visits, we figured this would be a plan; except we were looking for what most of us would recognise as a bike shop - front door, big window with stickers and posters and a couple of bikes padlocked (this is london) outside. and that's kind of where we went wrong.

tour de ville is not your ordinary cycle shop no matter what criteria you apply. for starters, while the large open courtyard leading into the shop has the name writ large on the brickwork, along with graffiti like bike caricatures, these are shielded from wandering souls by two heavy, black gates. these, of course, were closed because the shop was, well, closed. however, without boring you with locatory details, we found the place, jos opening the gate while apologising that he didn't do mornings too well.

tour de ville workshop

if ever you wanted a bike shop that you could hang out in, tour de ville is it; if there is anything new on sale, i don't think we saw it. orderly rows of lovely european steel bicycle frames in colours rarely seen nowadays including a roger de vlaeminck badged colnago (with his initials engraved on the fork crown and photo on the head tube). there are components that were made before mark cavendish owned his first trike, along with a full campagnolo toolkit in the workshop still in every day use. jos made magnus maximus coffee, keith proudly showed a creative front wheel spoke pattern, and we just marvelled at the surrounding velocipedinal machinery.

ironically, on our i think we might be lost trudge to get to tdv, we had popped into a proper bike shop which wasn't too impressive at the time, and lost any lustre whatsoever by comparison. jos and keith are excellent hosts and their acquired stockholding really makes you wonder what our (my) fascination with carbon is all about. if ever you find yourself in london, do yourself a massive favour and take the tube to hackney and walk on to lambs lane, because there will be a huge gap in your quality of life if you don't.

one day, all bike shops will be like this (again).

tour de ville






twmp

posted on saturday 21 march 2009

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