Our mission

The Starling Cycles Story

Starling Cycles are beautifully simple, steel mountain bikes that are built by hand in the UK.

Starling Cycles brings a fresh approach to high-performance mountain bikes.

Developed, engineered and handmade for the demands of UK trails, our bikes are ready to take on the world. 

The simplicity and reliability of single pivot, the durability and compliance of hand-built steel and the peace of mind of talking to the expert that built your bike. 

We create bikes like no other with a ride only Starling can deliver.

handmade in the UK, made to take on the world.

Starling Cycles was founded in 2015 by Joe McEwan, a career aerospace engineer and carbon composites expert.

What started as a one-man-band in a garden shed quickly caught the attention of the global media and mountain bike community.

Dirt Magazine’s Steve Jones proved the Starling Cycles Murmur to be fastest bike in their final enduro bike group test, Pinkbike’s Paul Aston described it as “easily one of my top two favourite 29er trail bikes”. 

Starling won awards at the 2016, 2018 and 2019 Bespoked Bike Shows against stiff competition. 

In 2019, Dan Bishop won the overall British National Enduro Series and British Enduro National Champs on a Murmur. 2020 saw NSMB, LoamWolf, BikeMag and many others fall in love with our bikes publishing rave reviews. 2021 saw MBUK award the Murmur ‘Best in Test’. 

In ’22 we released the long-awaited V-3 update to the Swoop, Murmur and Twist. Fleur won National Enduro Champs on a Swoop and the press continued to shower our bikes with praise – including a glowing MBUK review for the Roost hardtail and an Editor’s Choice award from BikeRumor.

2023 saw Starling move-up once again to a new manufacturing premises, continuing to hand-build beautiful mountain bikes for riders all over the world.

Bikes that perform simply, bikes that simply perform.

Our goal is to eliminate complexity.

Our bikes are the antithesis of marketing-driven design and the insistence that increased complexity equals increased performance. 

They are built to be tough yet lightweight. Beautiful to look at and brutally fast. They are quick to set up, a blast to ride and a breeze to maintain. They are sustainably made, repairable and recyclable at end-of-life. 

That commitment to simplicity doesn’t mean basic, it doesn’t mean obvious; it takes an incredible amount of experience and knowledge to create a machine that’s simply performs.

Ready to learn more?

You can learn more about our bikes here.
You can nerd-out on our Tech Journal here.
All of our latest news is here on our blog.
You can follow us on Facebook here and Instagram here.