James Hilton | Death Machines of London

DEATH MACHINES OF LONDON

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IT SEEMED LIKE A GOOD IDEA AT THE TIME.

A few years ago, I started tinkering with my Triumph Thruxton motorcycle. I quite fancied the idea of building a custom café racer, and so did what everyone else does who has delusions of becoming a bike builder: I bought all sorts of crap off the internet. Obviously, I didn’t have the first idea how to install any of it, which is where my friend and long-suffering mechanic, Ray, came into the picture.

"Mate, can you put all this on the bike? It’ll be a cool custom," I said. "It won’t," Ray replied. "It’ll be your shitty Triumph with some new parts on it."

But being the gent that he is, and not wishing to see the £2000 in my pocket cause me inconvenience, he took on the job. What a nice man. A month or two later Ray told me it was done. "Does it look cool?" I asked. "No," he replied. Clearly Ray didn’t understand the creative genius (I mean, do you know who I am?!) of what he was looking at, so I went to see for myself. And yeah... pretty shit.

"Look" Ray said, "if you want to see what actual custom bikes look like, go down to this thing called The Bike Shed exhibition." Which is exactly what I did.

'AIRTAIL' / 1981 MOTO GUZZI LE MANS MK2 / DM01

I was amazed at the level of craft on display at the show; the engineering, materials and imagination were inspiring. Before going I'd had no idea where the benchmark was. It turned out it was high. It was very high. However, amongst all that brilliance, something was missing – a story. All the machines were just machines. There didn't appear to be any reason behind them, they were made because they could be.

I noticed that, on the whole, the custom motorcycle scene seemed to have missed the connection between the machine, the story and brand. The large manufacturers like Triumph, Ducati and Harley Davidson of course understood it, but this wasn’t being carried through into the bespoke, garage-build community. And so, standing there in the exhibition, surrounded by the exceptional, but largely formulaic, design and engineering, the initial thought of ‘let’s build a bike’ rapidly morphed into ‘let’s build a brand’.

As we were leaving, I turned to Justene (my long-suffering girlfriend – see a pattern forming?) and said: "This time next year, we’ll have a motorcycle company and we’ll be exhibiting here."

"Yay!" she didn’t say.

'UP YOURS COPPER' / 2007 TRIUMPH THRUXTON 900 / DM02

Well, that escalated quickly.

Five years later and Ray, Justene, George and I are on build number five. We did indeed exhibit at The Bike Shed that following year, and every year since. We’ve been featured in GQ, Esquire, HypeBeast, Highsnobiety, and virtually every motorcycle publication there is, including two new books on motorcycle design. We’ve designed and produced (with quite ridiculous attention to detail) a range of t-shirts, art prints and hoodies that are now sold in the US, Canada, Australia and Japan.

In 2018, 2019 and 2020 we were awarded Motorcycle of the Year by DesignBoom magazine – the international design culture and architecture journal. And to top it all off, Netflix have just made an episode about us for their new design and technology show.

To say it’s been smooth sailing would be a lie. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance it isn’t. But that’s OK, because I’ve learned more in the past few years about, well, everything, than I have in the past thirty. What does the future hold? I have no idea, but that’s OK as well – not knowing where you’re riding to is half the fun.