Brooks Scape Saddle Pocket Bag

The Brooks Scape Saddle Pocket Bag is a high-performance bag for day trips or bigger adventures thanks to its modularity. It's rugged, waterproof, lightweight, and the 0.7-litre capacity is perfect for carrying a day's worth of stuff. A couple of minor design niggles prevent it from being top of the class, and it's costly too.

Scape – presumably Brooks' trendy take on the word escape – is its new lineup of bike bags built specifically for travelling, be it short trips, bikepacking or international travel. Even the colour of its bags – 'Mud' – is bang on for the adventure fashion. (Check out those we've already reviewed here.)

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The Scape Saddle Pocket Bag takes the role of the ever popular underslung saddle luggage, and with its 0.7L capacity it's the ideal bag for strapping to your bike to carry your things.

But Brooks has in mind something more than being resigned to your saddle for its working life. The Scape lineup embraces modularity, meaning some bags connect to others thanks to a system of loops and straps, allowing you to change up their purpose depending on the ride you've got planned.

For instance, the Saddle Pocket Bag can be connected to the Handlebar Pouch, Seat Bag, and Large Pannier, allowing you to increase your overall storage space. You could purchase multiples and bolt them on, depending on how creative you want to get.

It's a very neat system, but how does the Saddle Pocket Bag fare on its own?

As mentioned a little earlier, the storage space is excellent for day trips, allowing you to carry just enough to keep you going, minimising the amount of storage you need elsewhere on the bike. It's 150mm long, 80mm wide and 55mm high. Weighing in at 69g, it's really light, given its overall size and capacity.

Fitting the bag to your saddle is incredibly simple – just loop one end of the strap through your seat rail, and the other end through the opposite seat rail, and then fasten the Velcro strap down. The super wide strap means the bag feels rock solid.

I could fit a 2020 iPhone SE (that's about the biggest phone it'll accept), a wallet, keys, some snack bars and all my tools and repair kits, and I still had space to spare for gloves. I even managed to fit in a Lezyne Pocket Drive mini pump.

Had I not been running tubeless, I could have also packed a spare inner tube, which would have just squeezed in. The bag might not look huge on the outside, but it's surprisingly capacious.

That's probably helped out by the fact that inside is just one big space, with no pockets or compartments to keep things in place. This brings me neatly to my one criticism with the interior: you need to be meticulous how you pack it.

If there are keys loose among a bag with an expensive smartphone inside, you know what's going to happen to that screen, right? And the other issue is, if the bag isn't full of stuff, things can move about.

While that might seem more of an annoyance than anything, it actually affects the rigidity of the bag. The bag's super-tough, welded material construction is great for keeping the innards dry (mostly – we'll get to that in a bit) and it's great for durability too – more so thanks to the use of Hypalon on the strap, and foam padded Hypalon patches on the top and bottom. But because there's no reinforcement on the inside, it doesn't keep its shape very well. Just look at the photo from the rear and you'll see what I mean – the side with the nifty reflective Brooks logo (no rear light attachment sadly, my friends) collapses slightly when it's strapped down.

This also affects the operation of the zip, which runs along the majority of the front section of the bag (facing the seatpost). If the bag is full then it's not really an issue, but if it isn't, it means the bag has an annoying habit of collapsing in on itself when the zip reaches the front section. You can pinch the zip section to help it move along in either direction, but it's not ideal.

Getting to the zip isn't particularly easy when it's mounted, either, but thankfully, unfastening the strap is easy enough that you can just remove the bag altogether to get to the innards. There's an auto-lock zip to keep the bag from accidentally opening up when it's in the locked position, and the zip has been coated to help keep out the elements.

Interestingly, Brooks claims the Saddle Pocket Bag is 100 per cent waterproof, only... it's not. I think what Brooks meant to state was that the material is 100 per cent waterproof, not the entire bag, because the zip failed the tap test pretty miserably. After less than a minute of being soaked under a stream of water, the interior was soaking wet. So material, yes. Zip, no.

If you check out the rest of the bags in the Scape range, you'll notice that on some bags, instead of saying '100% waterproof', it says 'superior waterproof (IPX4 certified)'. I reckon this is Brooks' way of saying the latter are actually genuinely 100 per cent waterproof.

> 15 easy ways to carry stuff on your bike

That said, I've run this bag through some pretty crap weather, and I've even washed my bike with the bag in place. Not completely unsurprisingly, since the zip is around the front and the saddle offers a lot of natural protection from the elements, it hasn't let in a drop of water during any of those escapades. Provided you're not submerging your saddle, I'm sure the bag will do just fine.

How does it compare?

We've reviewed umpteen seat bags on road.cc, but how does the Scape Saddle Pocket Bag compare against those with a similar capacity? It's slightly more capacious than the Silca Mattone Seat Pack, and lighter, though it is a little longer (which might be an issue if you have your saddle far forward).

The Boa system on the Mattone is a plus, though there's nothing wrong with the Scape's straightforward Velcro fastener. The Mattone is nowhere near as resistant to water ingress as the Scape, and it's a fiver more. Easy win for Brooks, in my book.

> Buyer’s Guide: 23 of the best bikepacking bags

For similar money (£40 seems to be the sweet spot), the PRO Discover Saddle Bag offers a little less space at 0.6L, but unlike the Scape it uses a roll-top closure, so it's totally water tight. You can also access the interior space from the rear.

Conclusion

Zip issues aside, I do think this is a superb little seat bag. It's on the expensive side, but in return I reckon you're going to get a lot of life out of it – the quality of the construction is A-game stuff. A couple of organiser pockets on the inside would've been nice, but it's pretty obvious Brooks has prioritised storage space and weight over total practicality. That's fine with me.

Verdict

Bulletproof bag that's light and highly resistant to the elements, but the zip is a minor bugbear