manchester bike show 2017, part 1 …


I went down to the Manchester Bike Show with my nephew yesterday at Event City which is located right next door to the Trafford Centre. The weather in Manchester on Saturday was just glorious and although I didn’t travel by bike, plenty did and they were able to make the most of what felt like a summers day.  Although not as large and as glitzy as the annual NEC show in Birmingham its’ always well worth a visit and now in its 6th year at Event City it seems to have firmly established itself on the calendar. At £14 a ticket its decent value as well  (£14 advance, £17 on the door).

It looked to me like almost all of the major manufactures were there, although I was personally dissapointed that Moto Guzzi hadn’t taken up the option of a display. MV Agusta were not there either, which was a shame as their bikes are almost always worth a look at. Apparently there were more than a 100 exhibitors there and it wasn’t at all difficult to pass a few hours away.

We were there as the doors opened at 09:30, which was ideal as it meant that the first hour or so at the show was relatively uncrowded – by mid morning the place was rammed.

 

It doesn’t seem to matter how many bike shows I go to, I never get bored of just wandering round and looking. There was plenty there that was out of my financial reach, plenty that were affordable, plenty that I could appreciate but not desire and some that just made me wonder why.

In 1742 the Scottish philosopher David Hume wrote that ‘Beauty in things exists merely in the mind which contemplates them’ more commonly we tend to say that beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

One bike in particular which was a beauty to my eyes and  which I would love to have was the Spitfire from Bolton based CCM Motorcycles. They are set to build only 150 of them and I cant imagine that they wont all sell quickly.  There’s a link to a short You Tube video here and an online brochure here

But if the Spitfire was beautiful to me there were others that were less so, that just don’t do it for me and that I just don’t get, I don’t mean to be at all disrespectful to the owners – its just not my cup of tea.

With more bikes on display than you could shake a stick at it’s not really possible for me to picture them all, but I’ve included a whole bunch of pictures in the below and clicking on the first will open a scrollable gallery.

I’ll post more later in part 2 from the Manchester Bike Show when Ive spent some more time sifting through yesterdays photo’s, and if like me you are forever taking loads of pictures you might be interested in looking at an earlier post about protecting your digital legacy with the vivala.me approach.

Click these links for Part 2 and Part 3