Quirk Cycles has won Best Road Bike at Bespoked London 2026, with the prize handed down on Friday evening as the show opened at Unit 8, in the Bussey Building in Peckham.
The Hackney custom bike builder, founded by Rob Quirk over a decade ago, took the award for the Durmitor, a pure road-race bike, with new ‘custom-lite’ models available to order via the website.
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He was early to that party, but he eventually stepped back from building under his own name. His putting his hand on Quirk’s shoulder this weekend makes it feel more pivotal now.
Quirk Durmitor is a fast road race bike, designed for 35mm “slicks only” tyres. Shown here with Enve’s 4.5 Pro wheels, with silver stainless spokes, and a narrower rim bed, originally designed for the UAE Emirates pro team. A Shimano Dura-Ace groupset completes the build.
(Image credit: Andy Carr)
Best Road Bike – The Quirk Durmitor
Durmitor is Quirk’s fast road-race bike from his recently curated ‘stock-geometry’ model range, part of a shift in approach that will also include limited-edition batches – the most recent of which, we’re told, is now completely sold out.
The approach – which distils everything Quirk knows about bike design, drawn from his extensive custom work – is designed to make it easier to understand, commission, and order a bike that works for you. It also jettisons some of the drag that fully custom approaches can have in a small workshop context. Essential for the growth Quirk is shooting for, since teaming up with Mottram et al.
The Durmitor is made from handpicked Italian steel, Columbus Spirit – the very best non-stainless range. Spirit is a thin-wall steel tubing designed for the production of high-performance road bikes, and uses Quirk’s own 3D-printed stainless steel dropouts, head tube, and seat cluster.
Modern hardware is evident throughout: T47 bottom bracket, UDH hanger, 12mm thru-axles, flat-mount disc brakes, and a tapered steerer on an Enve fork. Electronic only. Clearance is 35mm, and is designed for “slicks only”, so you can assume that’s a relatively tight 35mm.
The build utilises Shimano Dura-Ace Di2 running gear, and is rolling on Enve 4.5 Pro wheels, the same wheels designed for Tadej Pogacar for use in last year’s Tour De France, here, paired with Enve’s own tyre. The frameset is £4,999.
Attention to detail
The bike looked outstanding as the centrepiece of a Japanese-themed stand, nicely timed ahead of the show’s move to Osaka, featuring a customised Honda Alty. The Alty imported from Japan for the event was adorned with decals spelling out Quirk phonetically in Japanese characters. Quirk informed me that the Japanese don’t have letters for Q, U, or R, making that design detail more necessary to keep the concept alive than it is deliberate. Lovely all the same, of course.
On closer inspection, the classic Japanese pickup truck was wearing period-correct Yokohama tyres. The beer crates looked like Asahi-branded crates but did in fact read, ‘Quirk’. Once upon a time, you’d have to pay a lot of money for that kind of thinking at Mother and other agencies like it.
Details hide everywhere in Rob Quirk’s work, whether you buy a full custom, or an off-the-peg model. This logo on the stem cap reveals itself only when you turn the bars.
(Image credit: Andy Carr)
The here and now – in Peckham
That Quirk and his bikes were back in the halls at all, after Rapha founder Simon Mottram led a £500,000 funding round into the brand last November, was a gesture. Seeing as though Quirk went all-in – with a stand that formed the centerpiece of the main hall – was a vote of confidence in the show as much as a strategic move for the brand.
The Bussey Building, for what it’s worth, looks like a venue Bespoked has been hunting for since it left Brunel’s Old Station in Bristol, the 1841 train shed at Temple Meads, where the show came of age. If Lee Valley VeloPark in Stratford gave the show scale, then Manchester’s Victoria Baths gave it character. Despite that, neither felt quite right after the creative restructuring Petor Georgallou and his wife Rosie have painstakingly led since taking over in 2022. Peckham does.
One or many no longer matters
Three other ‘small batch’ names are worth mentioning. Mason, with its quietly excellent small-batch steel and aluminium. Cotic, with a wonderful-looking gravel bike, made in steel tubing, with a very nicely integrated headset design. And Condor was back in full force, with the Condor Makers Area at the heart of the show running interactive workshops all weekend.
Condor’s been steadfast in waiting for this moment. The London brand has always sat slightly adjacent to the rooms’ “true handmade” participants, distinguishable mainly only by the fact that its frames are produced at arm’s length – by builders just as good as many in the room, based in larger workshops in Italy. When the Super Accaiao took the best road bike in Manchester in 2024, there was a quiet surprise in some corners that the prize hadn’t gone to a “more bespoke” builder. None of that this year.
Pashley’s a similar but slightly different case. The brand picked up an award for Best Fixie. For the excellent and ever-so playful, BMX-inspired Mini-Velo, the Skyline. Pashley is Britain’s oldest surviving bicycle manufacturer, in continuous production since 1926; it has never really marketed itself as a one-off custom workshop. But the brand’s presence in Peckham and the conversation I had on stage with Smallwood and Cumberbatch makes the same point from another angle.
A larger, low-volume manufacturer with great skills is leaning into the craft community, with their own range and what is also essentially a ‘smallish-batch’ production model.
That Bespoked welcomes Pashley alongside smaller workshops speaks volumes about how this community is defining itself now – by quality and craft, in whatever form works for the builder, rather than by volume alone.
The rising tide lifts all ships
Quirk perhaps represents a group of builders that hasn’t been ebbing as such of late, but has struggled to find a way forward amid the headwinds of the last few years. Now, the rising tide appears to be lifting progressives into more mainstream futures, in an evolving way.
The work Petor has done on the show is the energy that’s allowed it. With the misplaced stuffiness and politics of before gone.
You can sense the shift in who’s missing as much as who’s here. Sturdy Cycles, long-term Bespoked supporters, were at Rouleur Live last November, rather than Peckham this Spring.
So was Ricky Feather, Founder of the eponymous Feather Cycles, who said publicly recently how hard the one-off custom model has become, and who has since been actively building Wkndr – exhibiting at the London high-end bike show, Rouleur, in the Independent Bike Builders’ Room, alongside Sturdy and Pashley.
Wkndr is doing the same thing Quirk is doing now – repackaging a builder’s reputation and craft, refined over years of custom work, channelled in something more sustainable, which can grow. That offer, by design, has appeal outside of niche handmade shows.
Rob Quirk is the creative and technical chops behind every decision made at Quirk Cycles. Like a fully custom bike, the machines are as a much an expression of his expertise, as the full-blown custom models he used to make.
(Image credit: Andy Carr)
Japan is next for Quirk and friends
The next stop is Osaka. Bespoked debuts at the GLION Museum in October, and on the evidence of this weekend it will arrive in pretty good shape. Japan, of course, has been doing this for decades – NJS-certified Keirin builders, the metalwork tradition around Osaka, a whole culture that has never confused the question of craft with whether you build one bike or twenty-five.
With so many British brands now producing exceptional work either in model ranges or in batches, with UK design at their heart, that’s a genuinely exciting prospect. Particularly inside a wider bike industry that’s currently struggling to work out what it is and who it is for.
Robin Mather, of all people, singling our Quirk’s Durmitor this weekend doesn’t feel like a casual choice at all. He was right about this a decade ago and he’s still right now.
Quirk Durmitor’s are available for order now via the Quirk website.
Bespoked London 2026 continues at the Bussey Building until Sunday. Further category winners, including Best Fixie, went to Pashley for their extremely fun Skyline.
Medusa bikes took Best in Show and Best Finish, with bikes that represented everything that the old guard prizes most highly: very well-considered, heavily detailed, craft-centric bikes made in the traditional mode, lugged and entirely done by hand and file.
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