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"Dearie me," Will Butler-Adams sighs, raising his eyebrows in mock horror as he examines my bike. I’ve arrived at the Brompton factory in Brentford on my much-used fold-up, only to have the company’s chief executive start diagnosing its problems.

“The brake blocks are pretty much finished,” he tells me. "And it looks like it hasn’t seen oil in ages." As he wheels my bike to the factory floor for some “TLC” I feel as though I’m returning his toddler post baby-sitting, dirty and bruised.

A cynic might say this is a canny PR move. Brompton doesn’t advertise (“We we want to buy gadgets and machines”) so getting its message out is important. Yet Butler-Adams — and the whole company culture — is so fixated on its products and customers that it somehow seems more plausible that it pains them to see someone riding around on a battered Brompton.

In turn, Britain’s biggest bike maker inspires such devotion in fans that you’d assume they’re on commission. Brompton-ownership is almost cultish, with a nod of recognition our masonic handshake. “That’s because you look weird,” Butler-Adams laughs. “People still go: ‘It’s got those funny wheels; how’s that going to work?’ And you feel a bit smug.”

There’s an endearingly Tigger-esque quality to Butler-Adams. The 41-year-old, who is on the Evening Standard’s Progress 1000 list of influentials, bounces around the factory, talking with the enthusiasm of the convert; he’d never heard of Brompton before he was asked if he’d be interested in running the company (he met a friend of the bike’s inventor Andrew Ritchie on a coach). Since he took the helm in 2002 the business has grown from 24 staff to 240.

Brompton is one of an endangered species: a manufacturer that makes its products within the M25 and is hugely popular overseas. Its raison d’être, Butler-Adams stresses, isn’t building bikes for MAMILs to escape their unhappy marriages at weekends, it’s making “urban transport solutions”.

“We don’t sell to ‘cyclists’. Andrew invented a folding-bike but what he really wanted was a flying carpet that he could unroll and get around town then chuck in his rucksack. The industry is populated by mad-keen cyclists but that’s four per cent of the market.”

His ambition is to eliminate barriers to cycling — perspiration included. “Sweating doesn’t come from riding on the flat but from stopping and starting at the lights and going uphill. If you can put technology in that takes that bit out ...”

This is where the next Brompton innovation comes in: a folding bike with an electric motor. It’s not an electric bike, which requires a licence but a “pedelec” (a portmanteau of pedal and electric) with a push sensor in the pedals. “Eighty per cent of the time you’re pootling along and it does nothing. Then you’re heading up Notting Hill and the motor kicks in. You pedal up the hill as though you’re on the flat. It’s a naughty sensation, a surreal feeling of ‘Hey, I’m so f***ing strong’.”

Developing it has often seemed a Sisyphean task. “Nine years ago I had a prototype electric bicycle. I showed it to my investors: ‘This is the future, we’re nearly there!’ It’s a running gag for shareholders.”

The difficulty is that pedelecs are usually heavy and bulky, but for a fold-up bike the motor needs to be light and compact.

For three years Brompton tried to make it work in Taiwan. When that failed, Butler-Adams called a friend: Patrick Head, the former engineering director of the Williams F1 team. They had met because Head has a Brompton: “He used to take a chopper into Battersea and then get his bike out.” Williams had developed light motors so the two businesses teamed up.

Butler-Adams isn’t quite sure when the new model will be fit for the market. “We’d like to think next year but it’ll be ready when we have something we’re proud of. For the first time I feel we’re not going to fail. Before, we kept hitting immoveable technical problems.”

There’s still a cultural hurdle, though. In Germany, the pedelecs market is almost as large as for regular bicycles; here it’s “infinitesimally small”.

“In the UK people see a bike as an exercise machine principally. When you walk to a meeting, you walk, open the door and sit. What you don’t do is change into your running kit, sprint, turn up dripping with sweat, and then say: ‘Have you got a shower?’ Yet that’s what people do with cycling.”

The other big barrier in London is safety. Butler-Adams is an optimist here. “It may take 40 years but it will come. I think the direction of travel is right — but it needs to be accelerated, with more of the budget going to cycling infrastructure.” Oxford Street is a pet hate, though: “It’s a flipping death trap. There are massive pavements when there could be one cycle lane going both ways.”

He’s a big fan of segregated cycle superhighways but not standard cycle lanes: “They’re a gimmick. You shouldn’t cycle in cycle lanes: they’re full of glass, they have potholes, you’re in the curved bit and there’s a drain.”

Brompton is rolling out its own cycle hire scheme too, with docks already at Peckham Rye, Turnham Green and Walthamstow Central stations. “We’re flying by the seat of our pants but we’re passionate about it. Hopefully it will come good, then we can retrofit the electric bike into the same infrastructure.” It costs from £2.50 a day to hire a bike.

Buying a Brompton isn’t quite so cheap, of course: it costs around £1,000 depending on the model. In fact, the bike is so pricey that it can be a byword for elitism, hence its starring role in the BBC satire W1A. “We knew nothing about that. It appeared on telly and everyone laughed their heads off.”

I ask if Butler-Adams considers Brompton elitist, and he tells me to look out of the window at the car park. “We mostly employ working-class people. There are ‘transport solutions’ out there. How much do they cost?” A lot more than a Brompton, I concede.

He is keen to make the bikes more affordable, though, by adopting car makers’ payment-in-instalments model. The company is negotiating on behalf of its independent sellers to set this up.

The next challenge is a factory move to Greenford in December; Brompton has outgrown its home of 17 years and is spilling out into Portakabins. “The whole thing’s been a nightmare. We spent five years trying to buy somewhere; it’s virtually impossible, so we’re renting. It’ll cost us millions of pounds to move into a rented space.”

Crowded as it is, the Brompton factory is a treasure trove. There’s a 3D printer, some abandoned projects such as folding helmets, and some pedelec paraphernalia that I’m banned from mentioning even though I don’t understand what any of it is.

The Brompton has 1,200 parts, Butler-Adams tells me, but there are even more involved in making those parts. “One reason we manufacture in the UK is that it is our intellectual property, and there’s far more of it in how we make the bike than in the bike itself.”

Rivals have taken apart the bike and tried to emulate it. “Copying it without understanding it is dangerous. If the brakes go, and you’re on a hill, that can hurt.”

The atmosphere in the factory is surprisingly relaxed, though it’s a slacker-free zone. “We take people who don’t have great skills and give them a lot of skills. But they have to work extremely hard to get there.” This is especially true of the master braziers who have to be the “crème de la crème” and get to put their initials on bikes in honour of their work.

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Though Brompton has its first female brazier the factory is very male — something Butler-Adams is fighting to change. “We don’t have enough female engineers as they’re so hard to find. It’s now two in a team of 12.” This is reflected across the sector due — he feels — to schooling.

“It’s appalling. Half of the market are women but those [engineering] products are predominately men. I have three daughters, and too early in their education engineering is written off as dirty and for maths geeks.”

Generally he wishes we’d stop dividing children into arty creatives and practical scientists. “Engineering is creativity. It’s about coming up with solutions.” One of his employees studied mechanical engineering before a masters at the Royal College of Art.

As we collect my bike I ask Butler-Adams what he’d still like to achieve. “If we have 40 per cent of people cycling in London by the time I’m 80 I will be a happy man.” He smiles, handing me back my bike: “Now, that should be transformed.”

It is. I ride my bike away from the mothership, and nod with extra vigour at the other Brompton cyclists I see.

Follow Rosamund Urwin on Twitter: @RosamundUrwin