The workshop
A corner shop in Beeston with a brazing hearth out the back
Sid Standard Cycles was a corner shop at 35–37 Chilwell Road, selling tyres and doing repairs at the front while frames were built by hand in the room behind it. 287 of those frames have a sheet in the register, 1981–1999.
The window had the Superbes in it, bare and unbuilt, with a card propped in front explaining how they were made: handbuilt frame sets, built on these premises, using modern low temperature hearth brazing methods. Sid had signed it.
The premises came before the frames. Sid took over Arthur Panter’s shop at number 35, and at first the workshop stood across Chilwell Road; no frame was ever built in it. Brazing began only once he had taken on the launderette next door, knocked the two together and made the room behind the extended shop his workshop. Every Superbe came out of that room, which is why the head badge carries two street numbers instead of one.
Inside, rims went up the wall in rows and tubular tyres hung in loops off the ceiling. Most of Beeston learned to ride on something bought or mended in that room, which is what the plaque outside is really about.
“It’s all rideable”
Sid built frames himself, but most of the Superbes were brazed by Pete Riches, who had been chief frame maker at Mercian before he came to Beeston. His frames carry a handbuilt by Pete Riches transfer on the down tube, which is worth looking for on your own frame before you look for anything else.
Kev Jackson started at the shop straight from school and is still there, more than thirty years on. Where a sheet has been signed off, it’s usually one of the three of them.
Sid died in 2003. The shop is still on Chilwell Road, run now by Jamie Ireland and called Cycle Inn, and there are reminders of Sid all through it. The blue plaque is on the wall outside. One of Nottingham’s trams carries his name.
The frames went everywhere. This site exists to find the ones still out there, which is what the register is for — a number stamped in a bottom bracket, and the sheet that was written the day somebody ordered it.
The head badge names the shop and the street; the down tube carried the wordmark, gold with a black keyline, over the world champion stripes. There was a white version too, for a frame dark enough that gold wouldn’t read.
Worth checking your own down tube before anything else: a handbuilt by Pete Riches transfer sits below the wordmark on most of them.
£15 from every framed sheet goes to the Lincs & Notts Air Ambulance
Any sheet in the register can be printed and framed at £85. The order panel sits on each frame’s own page, next to the sheet it prints.
Prints come off the 600 dpi scan of the sheet itself, at the size the page was written, so what arrives is the document rather than a photograph of it.