iandriver wrote:+1 for a CX bike. The flexibility of them is fantastic. In the winter slop, you may well want to go above 25mm. You've got pretty much road bike performance with none of the limitation hangups.
Thanks.
Two bikes I'm particularly looking at are the the Ribble Winter Trainer (with mudguards and 10 speed Tiagra is available for £620) and that gets decent reviews. Also from ribble is their Cyclocross bike ( with mudguards and 10 speed Tiagra is available for £640) Ribble's CX appears to be relatively new as I can't find many/any reviews.
The Ribble Winter trainer can apparently only fit 23mm tyres with mudguards, where as the CX bike can fit much wider tyres.
The CX bikes comes with Cantis as opposed to Dual Pivot and I'd go for a 50/34 Compact on the CX bike (as I've got a CX bike for racing that's 46/36, so I wouldn't be usign the CX bike for CX).