Albion All Road Lightweight Short Sleeve Jersey review: The best out there, but it does have a flaw

I’ve been trying a huge variety of jerseys lately in order to put together my guide to the best cycling jerseys on the market, and it’s always telling what I reach for to wear when riding when I am not actually testing. If it’s short sleeve weather and not horrifically hot I almost always find myself throwing the Albion All Road jersey on, and that’s why I rate it as the best overall. It’s not perfect, but it hits this goldilocks zone that I think all great products do whereby it does most things really well.

Given the all-road moniker I’ve tried it for both road and gravel riding, but to be honest beyond a few extra pockets I don’t think there’s a great degree of difference between ‘normal’ and ‘gravel’ jerseys, and I just wear road gear all the time anyway. Regardless, it’s seen some extended dirty action too, and a fair few wash cycles.

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Design and aesthetics

If I had to sum up the design of the Albion All Road jersey I’d probably go with something like ‘no funny business’. No bells and whistles, no novel new features, it just does the basics really well. The front consists of two simple panels of lightly perforated material, and the back is one piece of an unperforated Lycra. The sides are also one-panel pieces of perforated, and the shoulder pieces extend from the back of the neck over the shoulder and down the arms in one single piece.

The collar is low profile and modern, but not cut like any of the best aero jerseys which tend to have a much wider neck hole - the collar does still do a tiny bit up your neck, rather than resting on your collarbones.

Branding, as per Albion’s usual, is minimal, but actually more than normal for the brand. There’s the standard off-white logo on the arm, but down the back there’s also a large Albion wordmark in a low contrast colour. One of the reasons I like Albion is the minimal aesthetic, and this is about as brash as the brand has ever been in terms of putting its logo out there.

The rear three pockets are mesh, the same as the material for the front of the jersey, but curiously there’s no zipped valuables pocket. This is a bit of an omission, and the only misstep I can really point to from a design perspective but I think it matters less now than it used to. Modern phones are so big now that they rarely fit in a valuable pocket anyway, and as for keys, I tend to slip them into one of the rear pockets on whichever set of cargo bibs I’m using at the time. If you are a staunch no-cargo rider then pop your keys in your bar bag. Maybe if you’re properly old school then this may actually be an issue, but for me it never was.

In terms of fit the cut is pretty modern, but which I mean tight. I usually wear a small and this is bang on how a jersey should fit for my liking. There’s a veeeeeery slight compression, but nothing nearly so drastic as something like the Rapha Pro Team Aero jersey. Given how I think it’s been designed not just for road riding but also for ultra racers on hardtails the torso is pleasingly long. I often find the front of jerseys too short, but that’s not the case here. You could probably size up if you wanted a slightly looser fit and I think it’d still work well too.

The sleeves are also just the right length. They’ve got a proper hem on them, but no grippers. In fact the only gripper is a silicone strip on the rear lower hem. It’s not overly wide, and while it is elasticated the jersey kind of just relies on the inherent stretch in the materials to keep it in place.

Colour wise, you’ve got this light blue-green (Lichen), along with a very handsome dark green with off-white branding. There’s also a special edition with a jazzy pattern based on LIDAR topography data, and an off-white number with orange branding, though I’m told that isn’t being continued. Not a massive selection, but all are good colours that will match a large variety of kits, and having myriad colour options in my view is just a recipe for creating textile waste.

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Performance

For a summer jersey, especially for use in Britain, the weight is perfect. While ultralight mesh jerseys have their place, the days of use they’ll get are few and far between. The mesh front is just airy enough that when temperatures really start to rise you don’t get too hot, and when paired with a merino base layer it’s decent enough for cooler rides. This is where the normal neckline comes in - on aero jerseys, I often find my base layer peeks out under the neck all too often, but here that isn’t the case when it’s done up, meaning if you want a thicker base you can.

Like all the best gear, the Albion All Road jersey is something you can easily just forget you’re wearing. For some jerseys I find I have to wear a base layer even when I don’t want to, either because of annoying labels or the stitching between the panels, but not so here.

The real winner for me in terms of fit are the shoulders though. Opting for a raglan sleeve, whereby the sleeve material extends up to the neck, means there are no seams on your shoulder. The result is it’s super comfy across the shoulders, and should you ever need to wear a backpack, hydration vest etc, then the straps won’t press any stitching into your body.

The sleeves are just the right length for me, and while they did ride up a little bit on longer rides I actually think I prefer that over aggressive arm grippers. I can deal with them for shorter, intense riding but for something that’s potentially aimed at multi-day use, avoiding anything aggressive next to the skin is paramount.

For a summer-weight jersey, the collar is great. Given there’s every chance you may use this for rides that start in the daylight and extend into the night the fact that it actually hugs the neck makes it just a hair more cosy, and helps to lock in any neck warmer that you might be using when the time comes to layer up.

The pockets are again unfussy but great. They are angled, which is something you don’t see a great deal, but also is evident on the Rapha Classic Jersey. The central pocket has a horizontal hem, while the outer pockets have hems that slope towards the edges. This is claimed to offer aero advantages, but the real benefit of this comes when you’re slipping your phone in, as you can almost push it sideways a bit rather than having to go straight in from the top. It’s marginal, but it’s better.

Something that often happens with sloped pocket hems though is the outer ones become very small. Not the case here, and the outer pockets can easily accommodate modern smartphones. The longer cut of the torso of the jersey too means the pockets aren’t so high up your back that you can’t use them.

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Value

The more use you get out of your jersey the better. Here is a jersey I’d be happy using on your every day, run of the mill road rides, gravel riding, bikepacking, and probably even XC MTB if I was rad enough to do that regularly.

It’ll cover you for even really hot weather too, though not quite as well as something made entirely of mesh. £125 is about the going rate these days for a good jersey, and while that doesn’t necessarily make this an absolute bargain I believe it’s a fair price for what you’re getting.

Verdict

When I pull together a buyer’s guide my first aim is to find the product that I’d recommend people buy when they have no clue what they want, and that’s what the Albion All Road jersey is. If you just want a very good cycling jersey that’ll cover you for more or less any summer riding eventuality then it’s a very safe bet. It works best with cargo bibs, as they’ll give you somewhere safer to pop your keys though.