The Time Traveller's Bikes

Want a slice of the fifties? Or perhaps you feel like a wild child off to Woodstock? Here are two Harleys that will take you travelling through time. Backwards, and yet not quite

- Aninda Sardar

I’VE GOT ELVIS HUMMING IN my head and I’m feeling all shook up on this wide open cruise. It’s so easy to imagine myself in a leather jacket, strong boots, long gauntlet gloves, jauntily tilted cap and goggles as the white walled tyres of the Harley-Davidson Deluxe hums on the highway. A tonne of chrome. Huge teardrop petrol tank. Valanced mudguards. Lovely leather solo seat. And 300 kilos of metal between the tyres! This motorcycle is all about heading back to the fifties. A decade when the world was coming out of the shadows of a devastating war, and America was celebrating its new status as a superpower with opulence.

The sixties may well have been all about swinging but it was truly the fifties when things started to take off. Especially in the world of motorcycling. Sure, there were some fantastic motorcycles that were built before World War II but it really was in the post-war era that motorcycles started becoming a lifestyle proposition. You chose to ride a motorcycle because you wanted to be cool and badass. Not because it was cheaper than a car. Across the Atlantic, in the UK, the other winning country that was madly into motorcycles, the youth had woken up to the café racer. Which was appropriate given UK’s twisty B-roads. Here, in America however, things were different. The wide open country meant that your motorcycle needed stability more than agility. The result was this. The cruiser.