As a kid the bike shop in my town excited me, I would walk past often, peering through the windows, glimpsing shiny bikes and related paraphernalia. Venturing inside, however, was a different matter. I wanted to, to inspect the machines and initiate myself into the ways of the proprietor and patrons but I couldn’t. The bike shop was a forbidding place where grown men discussed the intricacies of serious cycling in a language I didn’t possess. Serious cycling was what I aspired to and having convinced my parents to buy me a Trek rather than a Halfords bike I’d hoped I might be halfway there, but I was still way off. Leaping into the unknown, entering the bike shop with its array of gadgets, alien lingo and Lycra clad leg shavers was too daunting an undertaking for this self-conscious teeny-bopper: both literally and metaphorically I didn’t have the bollocks.

            Back in the present I’ve just bought a new (second hand) bike, so you can imagine my dismay on discovering that bike shops feel as intimidating after puberty as they did before. In an attempt to discover why I have set out to discuss their politics, revealing why getting ‘inside’ seems so hard and in turn why I run to Decathlon to buy my inner-tubes and cycling shorts. To aid my analysis I’ve isolated two distinct types of bike shop: Velo and Harrison’s.

            In Velo you will not find a bike for under £1500, and really you should be looking to spend twice that. Its name, the French word for bicycle, suggests why: it is only for those who already speak and fully appreciate the distinctly continental language of cycling (read racing). This means hiding one’s pain and gracefully pushing huge gears up Alpine cols, it means never dreaming of swinging past a tea-room on a 5 hour training ride. There are no racks of fully built bikes here, the displays of frames and components are an art installation, and Velo is a temple. Worthwhile shopping means distinguishing between hand built Italian frames, between carbon fibre Campagnolo groupsets and knowing how to glue tubular tyres to your Mavic wheels. If this wasn’t daunting enough Velo isn’t to be found on a high street near you, it’s in a trendy residential area. This weeds out browsers (people who don’t take cycling seriously) and means that inevitably you are the only customer, naked in the face of the proprietor, a sneering Italian Adonis who can see through your slacks and tell that you don’t shave your legs: ‘Easton EA90 SLXs, sir?’ This, together with the forbidding prices and the belittling displays forces you to acknowledge your ignorance, and leaves you ruing the day you dared to step inside.

            Harrison’s, by contrast, is not owned by an Italian, oh no. Geoff Harrison’s grandfather opened the shop in 1936, a fact he’ll remind you of frequently in a thick Sheffield accent as he repeatedly smoothes his greasy comb-over. Sadly, however, it’s no less forbidding than Velo. You might be more likely to stumble across it, located as it is in one of the city’s minor high streets, but the grimy windows are far from welcoming. If you manage to see past the dusty display of children’s cycles (circa 1984) and then follow the narrow path between rows of bikes to be fixed, already fixed and awaiting sale you might see Harrison himself, clad in overalls at his work bench, illuminated by a 40 watt bulb and scowling. The impenetrability of his shop relates to the secretive, almost tribal nature of British cycling clubs. For a long period of time it was illegal to race on British roads, thus secret time trials were arranged where people would use code names to refer to a meeting place where, inconspicuously dressed, they would race against the clock. As a result bike shops seem to have acquired an air of freemasonry or espionage that, in my uneducated opinion, they have never lost. The spooks that haunt them are wary of outsiders and as such perpetually scowling; like the Welsh they converse in a secret language when others are present, which makes being in their presence unbearably unpleasant.

            It seems, then, that we should conclude that the cold aura that surrounds cycling shops stems from something inherent in cycling and in serious cyclists themselves. The shops don’t need to be welcoming because, like junkies to a dealer, their customers will turn up anyway. Velo probably doesn’t even need to sell a bike a week to make it profitable for Marco and Geoff Harrison’s business is so intimately linked to the city’s cycling clubs that, rather like a porn baron, he is guaranteed a steady stream of customers after lube and chains and tight fitting shorts. To carry the analogy further serious cycling is a bit like bondage: for those involved it’s incredibly exciting but they have to keep it a bit quiet because other people, with their cars and hairy legs, don’t really get it. This is what makes their circles so difficult to penetrate and for some, myself perhaps included, so alluring. I should end now, before I embarrass myself further, but before I go I should say that Velo and Harrison’s are based on real shops but I’ve renamed them. If you discover their counterparts in reality I beg you not be deterred from entering, I’ve never been inside either and they could be oases in the cycling wilderness.