Andrew Ritchie, 70, is the inventor of the Brompton folding bicycle. A Cambridge engineering graduate, he was a landscape gardener in 1975 when he designed a folding bike in his South Kensington flat, opposite Brompton Oratory.
Brompton Bicycle has since won awards, including the Prince Philip Designers Prize and two Queen’s Awards for Enterprise. It is now the UK’s largest bicycle manufacturer. Today Andrew lives in Oxford with his family.
How did your childhood influence your attitude to money?
I was born near Dorking in Surrey and at nine moved to Bradfield, Berkshire, and that was really home.
We were a parsimonious reasonably well-off middle class post-war family. Spoilings occasionally,...