Brazen bike thieves foiled in dramatic pursuit after nicking Bromptons from front of store and threatening to knife chasing shop manager

A brazen attempt by two young thieves to steal a pair of Bromptons from the front of a local bike shop was swiftly foiled following a dramatic chase by shopworkers, who managed to retrieve the folding bikes – despite being threatened with a “knife” by one of the thieves – within a minute of them leaving the store.

The shocking, if somewhat clumsy, daylight robbery attempt took place on Monday afternoon at AW Cycles in Reading, just seconds after staff had placed one of the Bromptons close to the shop’s entrance.

CCTV footage shared by AW Cycles on social media and with road.cc shows two young men wearing hoods enter the shop before almost immediately grabbing the popular folding bikes. One of the would-be thieves managed to immediately scarper from the building, while the other can be seen stumbling into the back of a startled customer, before eventually making his escape.

However, their simple plan was brought to a screeching halt by the instinctive quick thinking (and feet) of some staff members, who bolted out the door in hot pursuit of the hooded bike thieves.

While one of the hooded teenagers was stopped abruptly by a quick barge and knee to the back from his pursuer, causing him to drop the Brompton and flee, the other attempted to ride off on a strategically placed getaway bike, partially folded Brompton flapping in the wind, as he rode off – only for the bike to clatter to the ground and into the path of another staff member.

Dave, AW Cycle’s shop manager, tells road.cc that the hooded thief then threatened to “knife” him on multiple occasions if he didn’t hand over the Brompton, before eventually “legging” it. The shop’s CCTV footage then shows the staff members arriving back at the shop just 60 seconds after the bikes had initially been taken, a lightning-fast response owing to, Dave says, “pure instinct”.

“Is it really worth it over a bike?”

“It was Monday afternoon, kids kicking out of school time, so the shop was already quite busy with teenagers walking in and out. I was serving a guy in the Reading CC jersey, who was looking to buy some mudguards, when the front door went,” the shop manager tells road.cc of Monday’s bizarre bike theft attempt.

“You have to press a button to get through our doors, so it went, and I was aware of two young adults or teenagers walk in with their hoods up, which is not uncommon in a bike shop.

“And they just grabbed the two nearest Bromptons to the door, one of which we’d built about 30 seconds previously – we’d literally put it on the shop floor – and they just ran out with them. I clocked what was happening straight away, shouted at the others in the shop, and just went out the door after them without even thinking about it.”

Dave continued: “We got as far as the road, and one of my colleagues from the workshop, who is clearly much faster than me, caught me up and overtook me. And he managed to barge the guy with the folded Brompton, and kneed him in the back and into the wall, where he just gave up straightaway.

“We then caught the chap with the green Brompton, and it wasn’t fully folded, and he was trying to get onto a getaway bike, which he’d left just around the corner at the top of a hill. He was trying to get onto his bike and ride down the hill with a Brompton over his shoulder – and where it wasn’t folded properly it started flapping around and he ended up dropping it.”

However, as Dave quickly grabbed the bike and began to back away in the direction of the shop, the thief then “put his hand in his pocket and told me he was going to knife me if I didn’t drop the Brompton”.

“I didn’t see a knife but he was shoving his hands forwards in his pocket,” Dave says. “There’s lots of knife crime in Reading, so it wouldn’t surprise me if he had a knife, but without seeing it I wasn’t going to back down.

“He threatened to knife me again and I said ‘we’ve got CCTV footage of you robbing the bikes, if you knife me, you’re going to prison. Is it really worth it over a bike?’ And he kind of hesitated a little bit on that, but then he approached and threatened me again, at which point I felt my team were behind me, backing me up.

“So I said if he threatened me with a knife again, I’d bash him over the head with a Brompton. And that seemed to slow him down, he lost a bit of confidence then, after trying to be brave for his mates. So, we just backed away slowly, knowing that for every second that went by, a passer-by would step in.

“In the end, they turned and legged it, and we just walked back into the shop with the bikes. The whole thing took about a minute and a half from start to the finish. It all happened so quick, there was no time to think about reacting.”

Bringing the community together

Despite the rapid success of their retrieval efforts, Dave says the robbery attempt is “frustrating” due to the plethora of security arrangements put in place by the shop.

“It’s frustrating because we have high-value bikes locked up in the shop, we’re secure, we’ve got shutters, we’ve got metal doors, we’ve deliberately got an electric door system where you press a button to get in and out,” he says.

“It’s easy if you know where they are to get a bike in and out, but it’s tricky when you’re panicking and you’re rushing out of the shop, so we’ve got quite a lot of safety measures. We’re aware the Bromptons are high value, but we never considered that kids would come in and nick a Brompton quickly.

“You sort of feel that the kids who are opportunistic are going to be looking for mountain bikes, not Bromptons.”

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“They’d definitely been in the shop before,” he continues. “They went straight to the button, knew exactly where the Bromptons were.

“But I think what threw them was that there was a Brompton much closer to the door than normal, and the first kid went for that one, causing the second to panic. So, the fact that we’d just built that bike and it was in the wrong place actually played into our favour, and allowed us to catch them up a bit quicker.”

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Following the abruptly aborted robbery attempt, Dave says the shop has been inundated with support both in person and online, and that the incident has brought the local community in Caversham, Reading, together over the past few days.

“There’s been a massive outpouring of support from the community,” he says. “The day after there must have been 30 or 40 people come into the shop just to express their well wishes and say they were super happy we’d got the bikes back, and to ensure none of the staff were injured, to see what they could do to help, share the footage.

“And we’ve never had engagement like it for a social media post! One of our reps even dropped in yesterday with a packet of biscuits.”

The incident, Dave says, has been reported to the police, though – thanks to the notable lack of success enjoyed by police forces throughout the UK when it comes to tracking down bike thieves – he remains pessimistic that the perpetrators will be caught.

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“The sad fact is bike theft is so under-investigated by the police,” he tells road.cc. “If the bikes had been nicked, maybe they’d do more, but because we got the property back, we’ll be at the bottom of the queue.

“I’ve heard that Bedfordshire Police are not even investigating bike crime anymore because they don’t have the resources for it. Which is why I thought ‘if I let these bikes go, I’m never getting them back’”. So the instinct was to chase them.

“The silver lining is that it brought the community together. But unfortunately, my Bromptons are now locked up at the front of the shop.”