BikeBiz Bicycle and cycling retail news
The last shift of the last Raleigh bike builders ended yesterday.
For the record, the last bike assembled in Nottingham was a 20-in Raleigh Max kid’s bike, and the person who last touched it was 40-year old Barrie Wheat.
Raleigh’s last assembly workers got ‘thank-you’ mugs and redundancy cheques. A typical payout for a worker who had been at Raleigh 30+ years was £14 500, reported The Nottingham Evening Post.
The Triumph Road site will be used until Christmas by the admin staff and then, in the New Year, all personnel will start work at the Eastwood site.
The University of Nottingham will knock the factory down and create student housing. Other parts of the once-sprawling site – long ago sold off by the Derby Cycle Corporation – are already part of a new beginning for the Lenton/Radford area.
Sillitoe Court, part of phase two in the Raleigh Park housing development, and named after the author of ‘Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, the gritty 1950s novel based on a Raleigh capstan lathe operator, will have a permanent reminder of the area’s claim to fame: a 6.75m high sculpture of a bicycle.
