The best hybrid bikes — nine great urban transporters

The most popular bike style in the UK, hybrids are practical and comfortable, and their upright riding position makes them ideal for the office run or leisurely cruising the lanes.

As the name suggests, hybrids have aspects of road bikes and mountain bikes. From the road comes a lightweight frame and fast-rolling 700C wheels, while mountain bikes contribute flat bars, disc or V-brakes and wide-range gears. The tyres are usually an intermediate width and tread to provide enough cushioning and grip that rough surfaces like forest roads and tow paths are no obstacle,

There are many variations under the hybrid umbrella. At one end, flat-bar road bikes are great for zipping around the lanes and even some light touring, but with skinny tyres might not be as much fun on potholed city streets. At the other end of the range are fully-equipped European-style city bikes, with mudguards, rack and even built-in dynamo lights or a rear-wheel lock.

Hybrids make great urban transport for potholed streets or towpaths (CC BY-NC 2.0 Tom Blackwell:Flickr)

Hybrids are great transport. You can pick one up for less than a hundred quid, and by the time you get up the price range to £300-600 there are some really very nice bikes. That's where we've started with this selection. If that blows your budget take a look at our guide to the best cheap hybrid bikes.

Oddly, fully-equipped bikes are less common at higher prices. Manufacturers perhaps think buyers with more money to spend will want to choose their own mudguards, rack and so on, but we see lots of people riding nice quality hybrids without mudguards and just getting wet bums. Seems a bit daft.

It's not unusual for designers of hybrid bikes to specify alternatives to the ubiquitous rear derailleur and you'll find a couple of examples in our recommendations below. Hub gears are less unusual that on sportier bikes, and can pick up flat-bar singlespeeders very inexpensively because they's so simple.

Hybrids are great cheap transport. Bung even a £500 bike on Cycle To Work Scheme and you'll barely notice the payments disappearing from your pay packet. In fact, in many cities, you'll be better off. Compared to a London Zone 1-3 Travelcard at £144.80 per month, a £154.00 Bristol City peak travelcard or a Cambridge Megarider Plus bus ticket for £92, the repayments for a hybrid are trivial.

Let's take a look at some of your best choices in flat-bar bikes.

B'Twin Hoprider 520 — £320

First impressions of the review bike our teenage tester is riding to school daily are good. The model up from the £230 Hoprider 300, it has a suspension fork and seatpost to improve comfort over rough ground, and the transmission is decent quality, for the money eight-speed Shimano Acera.

Less obvious, but very welcome, it also comes with built-in dynamo lighting, Continental Touring Plus puncture-resistant tyres and trigger shifters rather than the twist-grips you often find on cheaper models. You even get a fairly decent set of metal-bodied pedals, a significant step up from the resin-bodied jobs found on most budget bikes.

Find a Decathlon store

Trek 7.1 FX — £375

Trek's best-selling city bike has a light aluminium frame, very wide-range 21-speed gears that'll get you up any hills you're likely to find in the UK, and convenient Shimano trigger shifters.

You don't get extras like a rack or mudguards, but the frame has all the necessary fittings for them, and will even take a Dutch-style frame/wheel lock like the AXA Defender so you can't forget your lock.

Find a Trek dealer

Foffa Urban 7 Speed Nexus — £499.99

With an aluminium steel frame and mudguards, the Foffa Urban is cheerful, nippy round-town transport. The key feature is the seven-speed Shimano Nexus internal hub gear, which gives a good range for urban riding without the fuss of a derailleur to get damaged or clag up with road grime.

Read our review of the Foffa Urban 7 Speed Nexus

Find a Foffa dealer

B'Twin Triban 540 — £500

B'Twin's Triban 540 promises road bike zip with the more upright position of a flat bar so you can sit up and admire the view or keep an eye out for random taxis.

The Triban 540 strikes a balance between speed and practicality. On the speed side, well, at heart it's a road bike. Skinny tyres, narrow saddle, seat a bit higher than the bars. On the other hand, it's got a flat bar, with gears controlled by mountain bike-style triggers so you never need move your hands away from the brakes.

The frame has fittings for rack and guards so it can be practical too and the Shimano Tiagra components make it a bargain for this price.

Read our first look

Raleigh Strada 4 — £523

At first glance the Raleigh Strada 4 appears to be a singlespeed. Look a bit closer and you find a clever SRAM Automatix two-speed hub gear that automatically changes to a higher gear at about 15kph; this gives you a low gear to get away from the lights and then switches up to allow you to accelerate through traffic.

The hub nestles in Raleigh's lightweight 6061 aluminium frame, and Strada mechanical disc brakes bring the whole thing firmly to a halt.

We used an earlier, belt-drive version as the basis for John's Project Practical.

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Charge Grater 2 — £419.99

Charge has always excelled at urban bikes. Watch London rush-hour bike traffic and you'll see a heck of a lot of them. We like the Grater's lightweight aluminium frame, and the fact that it comes with mudguards already fitted so you can't fail to get around to adding them and end up with a wet bum when it rains.

Wide-range Shimano gears, puncture resistant tyres and disc brakes are all nice, practical touches for a round-town ride, and at the current price it's a major bargain.

Find a Charge dealer

Whyte Victoria women's urban bike — £559.00

Hybrids intended for women tend to have a shorter top tube than their male equivalents, and have female friendly components like a woman's saddle, as here. With hydraulic disc brakes and nippy 28mm tyres, the Victoria is at the sportier end of hybrids; when you need to get a move on it's noticeably quick.

Read our review of the Whyte Victoria

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Boardman Hybrid Team — £629.10

Boardman is another brand that's ubiquitous on the city streets and just lately main man Chris Boardman has been all over the media advocating for cycling rights and plugging his book on bike design, The Biography of the Modern Bike.

Boardman somehow finds time to design nice hybrids too, like this aluminium-framed, round-tow speedster. At this level you start finding hydraulic disc brakes, usually a bit more reliable and less fiddly than cable brakes. The Hybrid Team also has a carbon fibre forks, which helps take teh sting out of potholes, and wide-range SRAM gearing.

Find a Halfords branch

Cannondale Quick Carbon 1 — £1499.99

The late, sadly missed bike reviewer Steve Worland described this luxury hybrid as: "Quick like a road bike, comfy like a mountain bike, with disc brake confidence; a thoroughbred mongrel of an all-rounder". A hybrid with a carbon fibre frame will seem over the top until the first time you have to carry it up several flights of stairs, at which point it suddenly makes perfect, shoulder-friendly sense.

It makes sense on the road too. Its instantly most obvious and endearing characteristic is its casual speed, while the handling far more sprightly than most hybrid type bikes.

The latest version of the Quick 1 has wide--range Shimano Tiagra gears, fast-rolling 25mm Schwalbe tyres and Magura hydraulic disc brakes. There are fittings for racks and mudguards too, it can be practical as well as quick.