A brief chat with... Mick Ofield

While the industry floundered to its end in the 1970s and the press was filled with the politics of it all, there were still people like Mick Ofield working on designs and ideas in the hope things would change. After having his artistic talent honed at school, Mick took a BA degree in product design at Leicester Polytechnic before joining NVT in the early 1970s. Mick worked on such things as the AJS Chindit 500cc MXer, Norton’s 850 Commando and other projects and recalls the frustration of politics restricting the potential of such ideas.

“It was a strange time in the UK, not a good time for industry, so when NVT’s Dennis Poore sent me to Southern California on a fact-finding mission for new products, the ‘can do’ attitude I met inspired me