Can't stop the chop

Unleash your inner kid the Raleigh Chopper is back

- Sam Challis

Those mismatched wheels, the long seat, the hi-rise bars and, of course, that T-bar gear I shifter... there was nothing like the Raleigh Chopper when it was released in 1969, and there hasn't been anything like it since.

For kids in the 1970s it was a must-have bike, and during that decade Raleigh shifted around 1.5 million units of the Mk.I and Mk.II models. So knowing how popular a modern re-release would be, Raleigh took a fastidious approach to recreating the Chopper, a project that required five years of development owing to the company not having many original design resources to draw from.

'We wanted to make the new bike as near to the original as possible, to the extent that the new parts could be retrofitted to old bikes, extending their lives,' says Jason Boness, product manager at Accell. Raleigh's parent company.