Raleigh Bicycle Company
British bicycle manufacturer
The Raleigh Bicycle Company is a British bicycle brand based in Nottingham, England, and founded by Woodhead and Angois in 1885. Using Raleigh as their brand name, it is one of the oldest bicycle companies in the world. After being acquired by Frank Bowden in December 1888, it became The Raleigh Cycle Company, which was registered as a limited liability company in January 1889. By 1913, it was the largest bicycle manufacturing company in the world. From 1921 to 1935, Raleigh also produced motorcycles and three-wheel cars, leading to the formation of Reliant Motors.
Raleigh bicycle is now a brand owned by the Dutch bicycle group Accell which it uses in Europe and licences out in other territories including to Canadian Tire in Canada and Suncross in India. Design and manufacturing no longer take place in the UK. In August 2026, Accell began insolvency proceedings.
In 2006, the Raleigh Chopper was named in the list of British design icons in the Great British Design Quest organised by the BBC and the Design Museum.
History
Early years
The history of Raleigh bicycles started in 1885, when Richard Morriss Woodhead from Sherwood Forest, and Paul Eugene Louis Angois, a French citizen, set up a small bicycle workshop in Raleigh Street, Nottingham, England. In the spring of that year, they started advertising in the local press.
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This entry incorporates text from “Raleigh Bicycle Company” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.