Best Of British Sonder

Parent company Alpkit may conjure up images of snow-capped peaks but Sonder’s quietly been developing a range of bikes raised on South-Yorkshire’s post-industrial scraps; product manager Neil Sutton takes us back to his formative trails

- Sim Mainey

Alpkit design, manufacture and source pretty much anything and everything you need for a good time in the hills — from socks and sporks to tents and torches. The company was started by a group of friends with a mutual lust for mountains who went from ogling Alpine peaks in books and magazines, to working in outdoor shops so they could afford to travel to those same peaks. Along the way they found their kit — bought at a discount from the outdoor shops they worked in — was starting to come apart. With hard-won experience of what worked and what didn’t and a vision of producing decent kit at prices even outdoor bums like themselves could afford, Alpkit was born.

Creating its own bike brand, then, was a natural progression for the business. Alpkit’s bike brand, Sonder Bikes, launched in 2016 and has grown into an 11-bike range covering road, gravel and mountain bikes — not that it likes to pigeon-hole things. Alpkit — and Sonder — may have its head in the Alps, but its feet are very much in the UK, where mountains are rarer.

Mountain biking in the UK happens in all kinds of places. Mountains, hills and dales may be the obvious ones, but not always the most common. Often riding is found in the in-between places that others have forgotten or deliberately ignored. The scraps of waste ground and slivers of woodland that have been written off as unusable and ugly have become as much the home of mountain biking as any Alpine trail.