Brooks B17 Narrow Imperial Saddle

The B17 Narrow Imperial features the central cut-out, first designed by BROOKS over 100 years ago. The “registered cutting”, as can be read in the 1890 catalogue, is “a sure preventive to all perineal pressure".

Width: 155mm
Length: 280mm
Weight: 500g
Frame: Chromium Plated Steel 

During the last year Brooks have prduced a number of prototypes of the Brooks Imperial saddle and distributed them to their best dealers and partners, as well as to over 100 passionate cyclists. The focus groups was including Brooks and non-Brooks users, cyclists who like saddles with with cut-out and those who don't. These have thoroughly tested the B17 Narrow Imperial saddle on various bicycles, terrains and weather conditions. 

Brooks say:

Nowadays most saddle manufacturers offer a range of anatomical saddles, claiming that they were the first to find this solution or that their invention works best. We recently discovered that Brooks offered saddles with cutting over 100 years earlier than any other saddle maker. In the 1890 Brooks Catalogue you can read that the Imperial, Long Distance, Climax and other saddles had “registered cutting, a sure preventive to all perineal pressure.

Discomfort in the genital area is definitely not a new issue. Brooks has produced saddles with cutting for over 50 years, till the 1950s we may suppose from the catalogues we preserve in our archives. This feature eventually went out of production after World War II. For many decades nobody spoke about the cutting anymore, until today’s saddle makers introduced this feature on modern “plastic saddles”. Why was the production of leather saddles with cutting discontinued? We don’t know, but certainly it is now time to reintroduce this line of saddles.

From the 1890s to the 1950s Brooks developed many shapes and sizes of cutting. When redesigning the cutting we prototyped a few of the original shapes and our final choice was the form found in a drawing of patent N° 20,144 of 1898. We slightly changed the length and width of the cutting and developed 2 distinct versions of it: a longer and wider one for men and a shorter and narrower one for women. These address the different needs of pressure relief of men and women.

MADE IN ENGLAND