The Sprint

The Splash

The Butterfly

Original article from A to B 61 September 07

Skirt guards play an essential role in keeping loose clothing – from dresses and skirts to coats and scarves – out of the rear wheel spokes,so they’re not entirely about women and not entirely about skirts. If you carry a child in a rack-mounted child seat, or an occasional adult on the rack itself, a guard will also help to keep questing fingers and toes out of the spokes. And they can help to cut spray from the rear tyre, quite a lot of which emerges sideways in bad weather.

They disappeared from English machines some forty years ago, when we still made real bicycles, and real ladies still rode them. From the 1970s,the British market became a place of tasteless Chinese MTBs equipped with mudguard-less knobbly tyres and not much else. You strapped a couple of these to the Discovery, roared off to the country park, and if you were silly enough to get caught any distance from the car when it rained, your skin-tight fluorescent Lycra got all wet and muddy, reinforcing your view that bicycles were only practical for fine weather and leisure rides. On the near Continent, the bicycle developed altogether differently. People rode to work, to the shops and to school, and they expected to do it in their everyday clothes. Skirt guards (dress guards in Europe) remained common, as indeed did lights, mudguards, bells, stands and all the other essentials.

But through the wilderness years, demand persisted in Britain, with ladies establishing secret supply routes from Continental purveyors. A handful of ‘real’ bike shops kept selling proper accessories too, and if you want to find one of these treasure troves, most of them advertise in A to B. One such establishment is Bicycle Workshop in west London, run – quite coincidentally – by a delightful lady called Ninon,one of the country’s key authorities on hub gears, and thus a frequent visitor to these pages.

A few months ago, a Sunday paper happened to mention that Bicycle Workshop kept skirt guards and the shop was inundated with grateful ladies, battering down the doors with their stiletto heels. All right, we made that bit up,but people certainly travelled from far and wide, and Ninon is now regarded as something of an authority on skirt guards,and so we test her current selection here. A word of warning, if you are considering a mail order purchase: most guards are designed to fit the classic Dutch roadster and may take some adaptation to fit to anything else, unless you happen to have a forty-year-old ladies roadster made in Birmingham, as we do.

Sprint (also Gist) – £8

The guard is a sort of squashed fabric umbrella that pulls down over the mudguard. It weighs next to nothing, it’s relatively cheap and it keeps clothing out of the spokes,but don’t expect the fabric to protect children’s fingers. Fixing is by elasticated straps which hook over the hub axle. This will not work with all hub gear bikes, and the fit of the guard is dictated by the position of mudguard clips – there wasn’t enough room on our Lafree. On the positive side, fitting and removal take a matter of seconds.

Splash – £15

The Splash is a much more sophisticated affair,with smoked plastic side panels that hook over the mudguard lip at three points,and are fixed to the seat stays with clips.It’s well made and looks good on the bike,but is designed for 28inch wheels and metal mudguards,neither of which are common in the UK. That said,it fitted adequately onto the plastic mudguards and 26-inch wheels of the Lafree,but with a slightly distorted look.The plastic guards are relatively flexible,so not the best for children,but they cover a big arc of wheel.The Splash comes with a choice of 16mm or 20mm fittings,and these can be used with or without rubber sleeves to suit most steel frame tubes and thin alloy tubes.

Butterfly – £15

Because the Butterfly is made from more rigid plastic,it comes in four pieces,with two each side, fitting in front and behind the wheel lock and/or dynamo. The more rigid material makes this the safest guard, but it’s also the fiddliest and slowest to fit,with little metal clips that firmly grasp the mudguard.The Butterfly looked fine with 26-inch wheels,and because of the two-piece assembly,should fit 28-inch too.The only weakness is that the fitting kit only came with 16mm stay clips,so we had to borrow the 20mm ones from the Splash to fit it to our alloy Lafree.This isn’t entirely satisfactory,because the neat clip covers are designed for 16mm clips,so they won’t fit properly on the bigger ones. But we liked it,and would probably choose this one as the most substantial,and arguably,the prettiest skirt guard.

Other designs come and go, according to availability. Mail order p&p £5, or visit the shop, but fitting must be booked in advance.
Bicycle Workshop
tel 020 7229 4850

A to B 61 September 07