Ted James Design
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Ted IS an animal, which isn’t to say that he’s subhuman. It’s the opposite, it’s like he’s the product of millions of years of evolution to be more perfectly suited to his habitat. People have to learn bicycles, but in the world of bicycles, Ted is an apex predator.
“People have tried to make it before but it hasn’t really worked. Probably because the suspension was shit. Even on mountain bikes when suspension came in, in the 90’s suspension wasn’t any good, it was ages before it was worth having. It’s 2” longer than normal and the head angle is really slack so it feels shit to ride around a car park, but riding it round the woods it just feels normal. You can ride it on trails where you can’t normally ride a BMX, but it’s different from a mountain bike because it’s small. You don’t have a big tyre buzzing up your arse, and you can throw it around a bit more underneath you. It’s such a good feeling! There are loads of wall rides ‘n’ stuff that I couldn’t do before because the runup was too rough or they needed too much digging, so I had to do them on a mountain bike. But I don’t want to do them on a mountain bike. I want to do them on a BMX and now I can.”
“People see it and say ‘that’s not a BMX it’s got suspension that’s a fucking mountain bike get a proper BMX! There are a lot of people who obviously aren’t keen on it. The funny thing is that modern BMX, like modern park riding and stuff, is far removed from the origins of BMX and where BMX has come from. These bikes are more BMX than anything else. BMX is bicycle motor cross and so the bikes imitate motor cross bikes. I think people would have a much worse reaction if Ruben Alcantara and Garett Byrnes weren’t building suspension bikes. They’re amazing riders and they’ve been riding these bikes and they find the suspension pretty good for old bodies”
The ESB (which stands for Extra Strong Bike) was born of the fixie scene of the mid 2000’s. At the time it was dubbed a “trick fixie” however it’s held up over the years as a multipurpose bike, because of its generous tyre clearances and conservative geometry as well as its reputation for being bombproof. Over the years, Ted has put together a huge number of extremely refined and exceptional bikes from the almost hyper-conservative to the fantastically experimental and the immaculately detailed and presented.
