The most popular bike style in the UK, you'll find that the best hybrid bikes are both practical and comfortable, and their upright riding position makes them ideal for the office run or leisurely cruising the lanes.
With (usually) 700C wheels, wide-range gears, flat bars and cantilever or disc brakes, hybrid bikes are midway between road and mountain bikes. They're the UK's most common and best-selling bike type.
The upright riding position makes the best hybrid bikes great for traffic, and for leisurely rides in the country — slow down and sniff the flowers.
Oddly few hybrid bikes come with practicalities like mudguards and rack. Budget £50-100 for them and get them fitted when you buy the bike. You'll be glad you did.
The best hybrid bikes are inexpensive transport par excellence, paying for themselves in just a few months if you live in a major city.
10 of the best hybrid bikes for 2020
- Dawes Discovery 201 —£400
- Carrera Subway 1 — £300
- Merida Speeder 900 — £1,350
- B’Twin Riverside 920 — £649.99
- Whyte Victoria women's urban bike 2021 — £799
- Decathlon Elops Hoprider 500 — £399.99
- Trek FX 1 2021 — £370
- Triban RC500 Flat Bar — £549.99
- Giant Escape 2 City Disc — £524.99
- Boardman HYB 8.9 — £1,000
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)
The best hybrid bikes 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 than 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 £153.60 per month, a £192.00 Bristol Plus travelpass or a Cambridge Megarider Plus bus ticket for £96, the repayments for a hybrid are trivial.
Let's take a look at some of your best choices in flat-bar bikes.
The best hybrid bikes
Dawes Discovery 201 —£400
An affordable hybrid from family and touring cycling expert Dawes, the Discovery 201 combines a lively compact aluminium frame with excellent 1x Shimano drivetrain to create a bike that will inspire a smile on your commute or weekend potter.
Manufacturers know so much about making aluminium bikes these days that they can make them well, even at a budget. So while other brands may try to seduce you with the next big thing, there is plenty of value to be had with manufacturers, such as Dawes, whose products rely on proven design and construction.
Even in wet weather and headwinds, this is a fun and 'enthusiastic' bike to pedal. Power transfer isn't compromised and while overall weight at 12.5kg is good enough at this point in the market, the Disco actually rides as sprightly as a lighter hybrid. Acceleration from a standstill is easy and there's a definite satisfaction to be had as you spin up to higher speeds.
Note: the link and price above is for the Discovery 201 EQ which costs an extra £30 for which you get full length mudguards, a rack and a kickstand. The base model appears to be sold out everywhere.
Read our review of the Dawes Discovery 201
Find a Dawes dealer
Carrera Subway 1 — £300
With its wide-range gears and fat tyres on mountain bike-style 27.5in wheels, Carrera's Subway 1 is an urban pothole basher par excellence at a very reasonable price.
The Subway harkens back to the days when a typical urban bike was a rigid mountain bike with slick tyres, a combination that exploits the mountain bike's upright, commanding position and excellent brakes while compensating for the resistance of knobbly tyres on Tarmac.
You'll almost certainly want mudguards and a rack, but at this price they're not a silly omission.
Merida Speeder 900 — £1,350
The Merida Speeder 900 lives up to its name as a supremely fast and efficient flat-bar road bike. The combination of its smooth and eager ride, impressive Shimano Ultegra spec and excellent Deore hydraulic disc brakes means that it's a whole lot of fun and not short on quality.
Because I spend much of my time testing commuter and flat-bar bikes, I generally hop aboard with flat mountain bike shoes and flat pedals rather than going down the route of clipping in. However, even in this rawest of states, the sheer speed and efficiency lurking within the Speeder 900 is hard to ignore. This is a very fast bike.
But more than just excellent straight-line speed and effective power transfer – so good, in fact, that I managed to rather upset a Lycra-clad roadie on a training ride – the Speeder's frame and fork offer a very enjoyable and involving ride experience. Front-end control at low and high speeds is fantastically accurate, which makes for a fun time in the saddle. It's so well balanced, in fact, that it really does feel like a well-sorted drop-bar road bike.
Read our review of the Merida Speeder 900
Find a Merida dealer
B’Twin Riverside 920 — £649.99
Who could imagine a big old lump of a hybrid – with 38mm tyres and a suspension fork and weighing north of 13kg – being any fun to cycle? Anybody riding something like that is in for a slog, right? Thankfully, nobody told those crazy French cats about accepted wisdom because in the B'Twin Riverside 920 they've managed to put together an incredible bike that combines all the practicalities of a hybrid, with a fun and enthusiastic ride and almost unlimited potential.
Read our review of the B’Twin Riverside 920
Whyte Victoria women's urban bike 2021 — £799
The latest version of Whyte's nippy round-towner incorporates a couple of the trends we started to see in hybrids in 2019: single chainrings and fat 650B tyres. With a wide-range gear selection at the wheel there's no real need for multiple chainrings, which makes for a more straightforward gear system. The wheels are smaller than the road-racing size 700C you usually find on hybrids, but with fat tyres they end up about the same size. The fat tyres make for more grip and cushioning, which has to be a good thing round town.
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.
The Portobello is the men's version.
Read our review of the Whyte Victoria
Find a Whyte dealer
Decathlon Elops Hoprider 500 — £399.99
The Elops (formerly B'Twin) Hoprider 500 from Decathlon comes with everything you need to pootle round town, to the office or the shops or just round the park for exercise. It's not the lightest hybrid ever, but it's very well specced for the money.
Off the peg, the Hoprider 500 comes with hub-powered lighting front and rear, mudguards, rack and kickstand. That's a great set of accessories for a hybrid (too often they're just a bare bike) and really makes this bike an excellent choice for commuting and other practical riding.
If you want something a bit more upmarket, the £649.99 Hoprider 900 has disc brakes, Shimano Deore gears and a built-in Axa Defender lock.
Read our review of the B'Twin Hoprider 520
Find a Decathlon store
Trek FX 1 2021 — £370
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.
Triban RC500 Flat Bar — £549.99
Decathlon's Triban RC500 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 RC500 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 Sora components make it a bargain for this price.
Read our first look at the very similar Triban 540
Giant Escape 2 City Disc — £524.99
A dry bum, a place to carry stuff and a kickstand so you don't have to lean it against a lamppost or railing to park it. There's also a triple chainset for a huge gear range, so if you head for the hills at the weekend you need fear no climb, however steep. Hydraulic disc brakes bring it to a halt and there are nice wide puncture -resistant tyres to keep you rolling.
Boardman HYB 8.9 — £1,000
Boardman is another brand that's ubiquitous on the city streets and main man Chris Boardman is similarly ubiquitous in the media advocating for cycling rights.
Boardman somehow finds time to design nice hybrids too, like this aluminium-framed, round-town speedster. It has hydraulic disc brakes for confident stopping and carbon fibre forks, which helps take the sting out of potholes, and wide-range SRAM Apex gearing with just a single chainring to keep things simple.
Explore the complete archive of reviews of urban and hybrid bikes on road.cc