The aim of this book is simple yet ambitious: to produce, in a single volume, a detailed and complete history of the Raleigh cycle company of Nottingham, from its founding to the present. It covers not only bicycles but also motorcycles, cars, vans, munitions, motorcycle engines, and bicycle and motorcycle gears. The story of Raleigh is fascinating in many different respects – the people, the products, the production methods, and more. The personalities involved were many and various, ranging from the founder's ambition to make the best bicycles money could buy to anonymous ‘suits' almost running the company into the ground from fancy offices in New York. But Raleigh also deeply touched the lives of tens of thousands of other people who depended on it, directly or indirectly, particularly in and around the city of Nottingham.