‘They’ve gone mad!’: Moment’s leading architect, 70, battles gang of moped thieves who tried to steal his £2,500 Brompton bike with an angle grinder
- Ben Derbyshire was sitting in El Ganso Café when the attempted theft happened
This is when an architect came face to face with a group of power tool moped thieves who were after his £2,500 Brompton bike while he was enjoying a lunchtime lunch nearby.
Ben Derbyshire, an esteemed architect who was president of the Royal Institute for British Architects (RIBA), 70, struggled with the masked thieves as they targeted his expensive bicycle that was locked outside a cafe in Hackney, east London.
The gang had tried to unlock the bicycle with angle grinders.
Mr Derbyshire ran out to confront the group after seeing the commotion in the street through the cafe’s glass windows and soon realized it was his expensive bike they were after.
You can see him grabbing his phone with one hand while clinging tightly to his bike with the other as the gang, wearing blacked-out helmets and riding black mopeds, tries to rob him.
Ben Derbyshire, an esteemed architect, was sitting in El Ganson Café in Hackney, East London when the attempted robbery took place
Mr. Derbyshire’s son and the owner of El Ganso Cafe then help him before the thieves drive off empty-handed.
The victim, the president of architecture firm HTA Design LLP, posted the video to Twitter and stated that he had been involved in an altercation with “angle-grinder-wielding rustlers.”
‘I thought I was in danger. At one point in particular I was quite pinned down with a lot of bikes in front of me and people behind me and I wasn’t in a position to run if I wanted to,” Derbyshire told the Evening Standard.
“I think what happened, from their point of view, it all got a little too complicated, so they kept quiet.”
He said the thieves first took their tools to the D-lock on his daughter’s bike before taking their drill to his Brompton.
Mr Derbyshire had seen the incident from behind the restaurant’s glass windows before running out onto the street where bystanders captured footage of the theft.
He added: “I thought I was in danger. At one point in particular I was quite pinned down with a lot of bikes in front of me and people behind me and couldn’t run away if I wanted to.’
Mr Derbyshire’s Brompton Bike was locked outside El Ganso cafe in Hackney, East London
Mr Derbyshire said the incident left him shocked and depressed.
“I just find that depressing and that they should be so aggressive about it. I mean, trying to intimidate me by shoving an angle grinder in my face. That’s not in it,” he said.
The number of crimes committed by moped criminals has skyrocketed over the past decade, with 3,803 moped offenses in 2021 compared to just 265 in 2011.
However, this number has fallen in recent years from their peak in 2017, when there were 23,909 incidents, according to The Telegraph.