Mirage — The Wigan House Brand That Put Plates on British BMX

Legend Bike Co · BMX heritage series

There is a kind of BMX company that never gets written up, because it never made a frame. It made the thing bolted to the front of the frame. Number plates, brake guards, bars, pads — the parts a racer buys with his own money on a Saturday morning, and the parts that end up in every photograph of every gate for a decade without anyone recording who made them. Mirage was one of those. It came out of a bike shop in Wigan, in the north of England, and it belonged to a man who had already been Britain's first BMX national number one before he started selling anything.

A racer who opened a shop

Alan Woods was a racer first. He holds the distinction of being the United Kingdom's first BMX national number one, and a photograph from the winter of 1980 into 1981 has him carrying plate 214 on a Redline — which places him in British BMX before most of the country knew the sport existed. He came to it from schoolboy motocross on the Lancashire tracks, in a household already pointed at two wheels: his father Arthur had ridden post-war speedway under the name Louis Lawson, and went on to serve as chairman of UKBMX while Alan raced.

The clearest account of what Woods built comes from a fellow racer. Writing for the British BMX Hall of Fame in 2017, Tim March — who first raced against him around 1980 — sets out the sequence: Woods was importing BMX bikes directly from the United States as a teenager, ran his own team, went on to create his own BMX brand, Mirage, opened a retail shop selling BMX, skateboards and records, and bought a coach to carry a busload of local kids around the country to race. The shop — Alans BMX — opened in Wigan in 1981 and is still there.

Mirage was his own brand, and that distinction matters. Britain in the early 1980s had a handful of shops importing American and Japanese hardware, and a few of those shop owners went a step further and put their own name on product — partly for margin, mostly because there were things riders needed that nobody was bringing in. Mirage sat in that category: a retailer's house label, made by someone who raced. In 2022 the British BMX Hall of Fame inducted Woods in its class of 2022 as a pioneer racer.

Plates, guards, and the Birmingham connection

The clearest surviving artifact is a Mirage race plate dated to 1983 in collector references — which puts the brand in production at the very start of the British boom, not in the middle of it. Plates and brake guards are the two period product lines that show up consistently, made in Wigan and sold through the shop.

There is one documented sponsorship arrangement, and it lands right in the middle of this section of the library. Surviving sponsorship correspondence records Mirage supplying plates in a range of colors to the Birmingham Wheels team. Birmingham Wheels was the West Midlands motorsport project built partly with unemployed labor, which ran a BMX track, a small bicycle factory and its own race team — the same site where the 1984 European Championships were held, and where the first prototype MRD frames were brazed in 1983. A shop brand from Wigan supplying plates to a jobs-scheme team in Birmingham is about as accurate a picture of how British BMX actually operated as you are going to get.

Handlebars were part of the range too, though the evidence for them is indirect and comes from the revival, below.

What Mirage did not do

It is worth being clear, because it is the sort of gap that gets filled in with guesswork. No Mirage frame is documented anywhere in the sources checked for this page. No Mirage race team is documented either — Alan Woods ran teams, but under other banners: a Robinson support team in 1983, a two-man Torker trick team in 1984, and the shop's own team since. Mirage appears to have been product, not a race program.

Woods could ride, too, and one story from his racing deserves preserving. The American pro Greg Hill was known for wearing "you lose" on the back of his race pants. Woods' answer was to put "I lose" on his — and then win the Kellogg's televised round at Newcastle wearing it.

The 2016 revival, and one set of surviving bars

Around 2016 the Mirage name came back through the same Wigan shop, this time as a line of reissue old-school parts: handlebars, cranks, stems, seat clamps, chainrings, headsets, and 1/8-inch chains with colored side plates and silver links. British collector forums picked it up immediately and gave it a genuinely mixed reception — the crossbars and the cranks were well received, and the reproduction crossbars sold at just under seventy pounds; the stems and seat clamps were criticized as too close to generic parts. Both views are on the record and both belong here.

The best detail in the whole Mirage story comes out of that revival. The reproduction crossbar design was only possible because a collector lent the company one of the only remaining sets of original Mirage bars to measure from. That is the entire problem with documenting a parts brand, stated in one sentence: the tooling was gone, the drawings were gone, and the only surviving specification for a British handlebar was a used pair in somebody's shed.

Timeline

• c. 1980 Alan Woods and Tim March first race against each other. Woods is already importing BMX bikes from the United States as a teenager.
• 1980-81 Woods races plate 214 on a Redline, and opens his Wigan shop in 1981 selling BMX, skateboards and records.
• 1983 Earliest dated Mirage artifact: a race plate. Woods also runs a Robinson support team this year, under that name rather than Mirage.
• Early 1980s Mirage race plates and brake guards are made in Wigan; plates are supplied in a range of colors to the Birmingham Wheels team.
• 1984 Woods launches a two-man Torker trick team as freestyle takes hold in Britain.
• c. 2016 The Mirage name returns as a reissue old-school parts line — crossbars, cranks, stems, seat clamps, chainrings, headsets and chains — with the crossbars reverse-engineered from one of the few surviving original sets.
• 2022 Alan Woods is inducted into the British BMX Hall of Fame, class of 2022, as a pioneer racer.

Sources

British BMX Hall of Fame, "Alan Woods Intro by Tim March," britishbmxhalloffame.com, published 22 May 2017, written by Tim March — the primary source for Mirage's founding: Woods importing BMX bikes direct from the USA as a teenager, running his own team, creating his own BMX brand Mirage, opening a shop selling BMX, skateboards and records, and buying a coach to take local riders racing; also his schoolboy motocross background, his father Arthur Woods riding post-war speedway as Louis Lawson and later chairing UKBMX, and the "I lose" race pants and the Kellogg's televised round win at Newcastle. British BMX Hall of Fame, "Congratulations to Alan Woods! Inducted into The British BMX Hall of Fame Class of 2022 — Pioneer Racer," published 31 December 2022, words by John Bentley — the induction, the shop's forty-year run in Wigan, the 1983 Robinson support team and the Torker trick team. britishbmxhalloffame.com, the Alan Woods interview page — his standing as UK BMX's first national number one and the winter 1980-81 photograph of him racing plate 214 on a Redline. radbmx.co.uk, forum topic "Mirage 'New' Old School BMX Parts," September 2016 — British riders confirming Mirage as the Wigan shop's own brand from the period, remembering the race plates, and discussing the 2016 reissue line including the crossbars at just under seventy pounds, the cranks, stems, seat clamps, headsets and chainrings, along with the detail that the reproduction crossbar design was measured from one of the only remaining sets of original bars, lent by a forum member. Search-indexed references recording Mirage race plates and brake guards as made by the Wigan shop, and sponsorship correspondence supplying Mirage plates in various colors to the Birmingham Wheels team; and a bmxmuseum.com reference entry dating a Mirage race plate to 1983 — bmxmuseum.com blocks automated access, so these are cited as seen in search indexing rather than read in full. Retailer listings for the current Mirage old-school parts range, including 1/8-inch chains with colored plates and silver links. bmxsociety.com was unreachable throughout this research.

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