leather saddle

Spa Cycles has brought out a range of three leather saddles at a distinctly more wallet-friendly price-point than their Brooks counterparts: the Wharfe to Brooks' Swift, the Aire to Brooks' Swallow, and the saddle here: the Spa Cycles Nidd to Brooks' B17.

The Nidd's dimensions are almost identical to the B17's with a length of 277 mm, a width of 168mm and a height of 65 mm, though at 623 grams on our scales it's a bit burlier than the B17's claimed 520 grams. At £35, it's also a heck of a lot cheaper.

Spa Cycle's Aire Leather Saddle is part of Spa's range of own-brand leather saddles that's been making waves recently at a fraction of the price of a Brooks equivalent.

That's not to say that the Spa offerings are just cheap clones; go back a few decades and you'd find other saddlers making saddles to the same basic template, it just happened that Brooks was the last man standing as the world moved on to vinyl, plastic and various flavours of artificial leather.

If you need proof that retro is the new futurism then look no further than this Brooks Colt. It's a retro throwback from 1979 but it's a more modern design than pretty much anything else Brooks sell. The shape is redolent of the period, all solid sides and snub nose and if you've got an early 80's steel framed project on the boil, this is the saddle to stick on top.