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If you've been to the bike shows or cast your eyes round the city streets you'll have noticed that retro is very much the modern thing and bike bits don't come much more retro-modern than the drilled version of TRP's RRL  drop bar levers.

If you're an urban rider in the market to make a serious style statement of the Italian variety and you likes your bikes in steel, the Wilier Ponte Vecchio could be for you. That said, this is Italian style of the full bore, unrestrained variety, Versace rather than Armani so it won't appeal to everybody. Unusually for a piece of Italian style it's very competitively priced too.

Kona's Paddy Wagon has been around for a while and I reckon the current version is the best looking one yet with its beautifully understated paint job. Ever since it came out (in 2004 if I remember correctly), I've wanted to get my hands one.

Pace have been fettling a range of bikes, bits and clothing from inside their shed on the Yorkshire Moors for near on 25 years although you may never have heard of them as up till now it's all been about mountain bikes. Most notably aluminium mountain bike frames, including one that they won't be allowed to let lie, famously and iconically made from square tubing that mountain bikers of a rose-tinted persuasion get all damp around the chamois over. So for Pace to come out with a bike made of *gasp* steel, with *faint* round tubing brazed into a *fetch the smelling salts* road bike, is certainly an unexpected departure to some.

SRAM's S900 brake lever is something a bit different. It's not often you get to see a brake-only lever for a road bike these days, they're all modern fancy units filled with all sorts of gear-changing trickery, but there's a small but significant army of fixed (the ones that use brakes at least), one-gear and (even if SRAM label these as a 'singlespeed' lever) a bunch of bike riders that use down-tube and bar-end shifters that don't need or want a brake-and-gear combo.

In setting out to build a bike capable of taking the rigours of fixed freestyle riding with their new Persona, Identiti have also produced a bike that's a great, rugged round town urban machine.

Fixed gear freestyle is definitely gaining popularity, it has progressed somewhat from the circus balancing acts better suited to performers in leotards to something a little more burly although those skinny jeans could be mistaken for denim leggins or jeggins *shudder*.