The Bicycle Book

The Bicycle Book Bella Bathurst A rip-roaring narrative celebration of the 21st century’s great transport success story: the bicycle. Millions of us now cycle, some obsessively, and this glorious concoction of history, anecdote, adventure and lycra-clad pedalling is the perfect read for two-wheelers of all kinds.‘At last – a bicycle book for the rest of us…. A book for the sort of cyclist who likes cycling and reading and stories.’ GuardianTwo wheels. A frame. Two pedals. What could be simpler than a bicycle?And yet the bike continues to inspire a passionate following. Since the millennium its use in Britain has doubled, and then doubled again. Thousands now cycle to work, with more and more taking it up every day.Acclaimed author Bella Bathurst takes us on a journey through cycling’s best stories and strangest incarnations, from the bicycle as a weapon of warfare to the secret life of couriers and the alchemy of framebuilding. With a cast of characters including the woman who watercycled across the Channel, the man who raced India’s Deccan Queen train and several of today’s top cyclists, she offers us a brilliantly engaging portrait of cycling’s past, present and world-conquering future. BELLA BATHURST The Bicycle Book I want to ride my bicycle I want to ride my bike I want to ride my bicycle I want to ride it where I like QUEEN, ‘Bicycle Race’ For Fog Beloved friend, teacher and fellow traveller, 1997–2010 Contents Cover (#ue043237f-258f-56d4-824f-5994c28cfeb4) Title Page (#u1d9d5a28-c438-5d6e-a34c-f46e73294797) Introduction Chapter One - Framebuilding Chapter Two - You Say You Want a Revolution Chapter Three - Feral Cycling and the Serious Men Chapter Four - The Great Wheel Chapter Five - Watercycling to France Chapter Six - The Worst Journey in the World Photographic Insert Chapter Seven - The Silent Black Line Chapter Eight - The Burning Man Chapter Nine - Bad Teeth No Bar Chapter Ten - Axles of Evil Chapter Eleven - Knobbled Conclusion - Love and Souplesse Glossary List of Illustrations Bibliography Acknowledgements About the Author Praise Also by Bella Bathurst Copyright About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo) Introduction ‘The gross and net result of it is that people who spent most of their natural lives riding iron bicycles over the rocky roadsteads of this parish get their personalities mixed up with the personalities of their bicycle as a result of the interchanging of the atoms of each of them … you would be surprised at the number of people in these parts who nearly are half people and half bicycles.’ FLANN O’BRIEN, THE THIRD POLICEMAN A bicycle undoubtedly has its downsides. It won’t shelter you from the elements, or protect you from the fury of your fellow traveller. It lacks the romance of a sailboat or the simplicity of your own two feet. It will not give you the same sensation that sitting in ?180,000-worth of over-charged horsepower does. It is miserable in the wet. No other form of transport ever takes it seriously. It is sliced up by cabs and menaced by buses. It is loathed by motorists and loved by the sort of politicians who would never dream of actually using it. It can’t transport you from one end of the world to the other in time for Christmas. It doesn’t have a particularly distinguished industrial history. It gets stolen, on average, every minute and a half. It delivers you at the end of your journey covered in a light film of sweat and toxic diesel particulates. It requires a lot of silly clothing. And, of course, it is occasionally fatal. And yet cycling obsesses people. They take it up for practical reasons – health, economy, twelve points on their driving licence – and before they know it they’re gleaming with zeal and talking slightly too fast about fixies and resting BPMs. Things that they hadn’t thought about since they were children start to preoccupy them – the stuff of bikes, the speed of them, their grace or style or character. It doesn’t take long before the daily commute to work becomes a journey to be looked forward to, an adventure instead of an ordeal. There are conversations with colleagues about bikes and the experience of cycling; new connections are made. On the road, they start silently checking out fellow converts. Looking for short cuts and alternative routes, they ride past bits of the city – intriguing, come-hither bits – they never knew existed. In their houses, items of bike kit start to multiply. Tyres and lights now take up as much space as hats and coats. They persuade themselves that lugging a muddy vintage steel-framed roadster up three flights of stairs at night is a reasonable way to get fit. Cycling starts to become as much a way of life and a philosophy as it does a form of transport. It spreads from work to weekends to holidays. They nominate themselves for sponsored rides and charity marathons. They stop thinking in miles and start thinking in kilometres. Almost by mistake, they find themselves in possession of a whole fleet of bikes: one for work, one for speed, one for the wet, one for annoying other people who know about bikes. They realise that one of the major advantages to cycling is the ability – more than that, the need – to consume their own bodyweight in spag bol and chocolate cake every day. Instead of road-tripping it round America as in the old days, family holidays are now spent hurtling through the Austrian Tyrol like two-wheeled von Trapps. They arrive at work early every day now, radiant with sweat and self-satisfaction. At home, they talk about getting rid of the car. In the evenings, they admire their newly altered profile in the mirror; the helmet hair, the buns of steel, the bloody knees. After a while they find themselves making unexpected judgement calls – can one cycle elegantly in a pencil skirt, what is the optimum number of children per bicycle, how wet is too wet, is Kent too far, perhaps an ?tape might be nice. They discover that the thing about cycling isn’t that it’s healthy, or environmentally friendly, or fast, or convenient, or politically correct. The thing about it is that it’s fun. Part of that is the straightforward childlike joy in riding a bike, the urge to yell, ‘Whheeee!’ on the way downhill. There’s a huge pleasure in going places cars can’t go, in dodging and weaving, in a bike’s simple agility. It makes previously unknown districts more accessible and familiar ones more difficult. It reinvents familiar geography, opens up towpaths or riverbanks or favoured rat runs across town. It offers the little tremor of happiness from bending urban by-laws back to suit the individual, and the constant delight in going straight to the front of the queue. It allows one to feel smooth and charged and graceful in a world full of blocks and obstructions. It has the peculiar attraction of being healthy, dirty and risky all at once. It offers the interesting discovery that getting to and from work need not necessarily mean the abandonment of sanity. It can be companionable or solitary, competitive or amicable. And, like the horse or the sailboat, it feels somehow as if it’s exactly the right pace for a human to travel. And so the bicycle – old, and cheap, and slightly comic – has become the twenty-first century’s great transport success story. Since the millennium, its use in Britain has doubled and then doubled again. Thousands now cycle to work, and more take it up every day. It has allowed the reinvention of the British landscape, opening up miles of Forestry Commission land to mountain bikers, and in doing so has given us back both the countryside and our sense of ourselves. It’s introduced thousands of people to racing and to the world of European pro-touring. It’s offered those of middle-aged mind and limb a chance to see themselves renewed. It has connected people through events and races and just hanging out. It has become the fastest and most reliable form of transport for people all over the country. In trial after trial, it is the bike which reaches its urban destination faster than the car, the bus, the tube or the pedestrian. It represents the power of self-reliance and the triumph of straightforwardness. Cycling has recycled itself. It is an ancient idea, and its time has finally come. I started writing this book because I wanted to read something good about cycling and bikes, and there didn’t seem to be that much around. There were books, certainly, but none of them were written for people like me. There were route guides or sports science manuals or conspiracy theorists poring over Lance Armstrong’s doping record or biographies of individual heroes. There were instructions on mending a puncture at 10,000ft or nerdy accounts of club cycling. There were breathless records of difficult trips and books hung just on the cycling-related pun in the title. But there wasn’t anything for the sort of cyclist who liked cycling, and reading, and stories, and who had long ago given up any desire to experiment with exogenous EPO. This, then, is not designed to tell the reader how to differentiate between brands of derailleur or explain why riding a bicycle is good for your health. There is plenty missing. I’ve left out most of the political and environmental debate (provision of facilities, zero emissions etc.) because it is either obvious or it is already well served by innumerable blogs and forums. I haven’t included anything on track cycling on the grounds that if you need a velodrome to do it then it is out of most people’s reach. There’s nothing on folding bikes, Moultons or recumbents because they look ridiculous and can’t corner. I cannot tell you about your VO2 max or how to lace a wheel. I don’t know how to stop your bike getting nicked and or how you become an Iron Man. I’ve picked and chosen quite shamelessly from all the available information on the basis of what I felt was interesting and useful. Because almost all cyclists feel a strong sense of ownership of both the bicycle and the experience of cycling, there will almost inevitably be some I can’t satisfy, and who will wish I’d included less of some stuff and more of another. That, I’m afraid, is an occupational hazard of writing about a subject about which so many people feel so passionately. The other occupational hazard, common to all non-fiction, is discovering that half the best stories come to you after the book is published. People write in, talk to you at book events, offer fabulous heaps of gold-mine material. Sometimes you get to include some of that material in future editions. Even if you don’t, there’s always the pleasure in knowing that the subject has inspired readers to dust off their own untold stories. My own background is straightforward. I ride a bicycle every day in London, I do as much mountain biking in Scotland as I can, I’ve done long tours abroad, I’ve taken part in sportives and audaxes, and that’s it. Like thousands of other cyclists around the country, I also use every other form of public and private transport available – cars, cabs, trains, planes, buses, the London Underground. I’m not a cyclist because I hate cars or can’t understand the pleasure of driving – I’m a cyclist because I reckon there is no lovelier form of transport. Chapter One Framebuilding Far away in a corner of Lincolnshire, there are men looking at the sky. They stand in a row in a car park and they stare at the clouds. They stay like that for quite a long time. In order to see the sky more closely, most of them have got cameras with huge white lenses of the type generally used by paparazzi photographers to take covert shots of celebrities’ deodorant marks. The lenses are the size and shape of ships’ foghorns, and are so heavy that they require a whole separate entourage of kit to support them – sandbags, tripods, vans, wives. Despite their supporting role, the wives do not seem to be that interested in either the cameras or the sky. Instead they sit patiently, sharing out home-made pasta with other wives or lying back on deck-chairs soaking up the flatland sun while the men swing their lenses from ground to cloud and back again. When the men have looked at the sky for long enough, they go and stare at a wall instead. Directly opposite the car park is a wooden perimeter fence a couple of metres high. With a small stepladder, it is easy enough for the men to press their lenses to the gaps or for the taller ones to see over the top. Anyone passing down the road from the nearby town can see a long line of men wobbling on their ladders with their noses pressed to the planks. It looks like a convention of trainee window cleaners, or maybe peeping toms – very British, but a little bit sinister too. It’s midsummer in the countryside, and this is the sort of scenery to make you believe in England again. Somewhere nearby, there are canals, bright expanses of poppies and the occasional heart-lifting lilt of a lark’s call. Once in a while a hare lollops out of the high fields of green grain and tears off into the distance, pursued by invisible demons. In the distance Coningsby’s church tower sails over the surrounding fields and the proper old-fashioned bell still tolls the hour. Even so, the men with long lenses have not picked a particularly restful place to sit back and picnic. Every twenty minutes or so there is a low rumble from somewhere far away. The men take it as a cue to start twiddling dials and taking urgent meter readings. The wives get up suddenly and run for the cars. The rumble moves closer, resolves itself into an approach from east or south and alters from a mutter to a roar. A small black dot appears over the tree tops. It is moving very fast. The sound has sharpened and is suddenly so huge that you have no choice but to stop whatever you’re doing and turn towards the source, so huge it blots out everything except itself. And then for a second a vast black triangle slides over the sun. It is very low now, low enough to see every detail. The men with the lenses click silently, their movements frantic. Indifferent, almighty, the triangle heads towards the runway. Even with your hands over your ears, the sound of it is now so overwhelming it makes your vision go fuzzy. Its passage makes your heart squeeze tight with fear and excitement, and when it has gone it leaves a stinking rip in the summer air. This is RAF Coningsby, home not only to the surviving RAF Battle of Britain planes (a Lancaster bomber, several Spitfires, a couple of Hurricanes and a Tiger Moth), but to the British contingent of Eurofighter Typhoons. The Lancasters and Spitfires alone would probably bring the planespotters in their droves, but the combination of nostalgia for World War Two and anticipation for the thrills of World War Three is almost irresistible. During particularly busy periods, including training days for the Battle of Britain displays, the car park and the whole surrounding area is full of people all busily destroying what remains of their hearing. Each man has his camera and a little notepad on which to keep track of dates, times, radio frequencies and serial numbers. If you like fighter planes, this place is Mecca. So it’s fortunate that Dave and Debbie Yates are keen on engineering in general. Their smallholding is about half a mile from the end of Coningsby’s runway, and life for them is punctuated by the roar of approaching bombers. They moved here four years ago from the North East, and have set the whole place up as a smallholding. In the winter, they train spaniels as gun dogs. And in the summer, Dave makes bicycles. Dave Yates is famous for his frames. In his time, working either as part of larger manufacturers or for himself, he has built the basic skeletons of over 12,000 bikes of every shape and size. Most of his time is spent here in the workshop either putting together bespoke frames for clients or repairing their old favourites. The rest of his time is spent teaching the secrets of framebuilding to others. It’s a rare skill. Once, there were thousands of small-scale frame-builders all over the country, producing a few steel-framed bikes a year for their local markets. But few individual framemakers managed to survive cycling’s long decline in popularity, and fewer still were prepared to teach what they knew to a new generation. Dave is one of only a handful of those who kept the faith. And after half a professional lifetime working for small-scale companies in the North East, he and Debbie came south and set up here. His workshop is over in a discreet corner of the farm well away from the main house. One half contains a lot of light industrial machinery – mills, lathes, obscure bits of componentry – while the horizontal bit is a light, comfortable space including three workbenches, a stack of Reynolds 531 and 521 tubing, a jig and several shoulder-height canisters of oxyacetylene gas. Despite the midsummer fields outside, the workshop has a very particular smell to it, a potent combination of metal, fire and instant coffee. For nine or ten individual weeks during the summer months, Dave takes two students (more would be impossible, since so much of his time involves working with things that might explode) and guides them through the construction of their own frame. That frame can be any shape or size as long as it is made from steel, can reasonably be made from scratch in five days and is not something silly like a tandem. Partly because he’s rare and partly because he’s good, there is usually a waiting list of about two years for a place on one of Yates’ courses. He has the patience of a born teacher, unflappable, generous with what he knows and truly passionate about his subject. As the week progresses, he begins to remind me of Gimli the dwarf in The Lord of the Rings. Not because he’s unusually small, but because there does seem to be some irresistible connection between fire and metalwork and dark, bearded Northern men. Besides, no one works with one element for the whole of their professional lives without taking on a few of its characteristics. His father worked in the Swan Hunter shipyard on Tyneside, and Dave took his passion for bikes first into teaching metalwork and then into framebuilding. ‘I loved making things, I loved fiddling about with things, I loved building things. But I never had a point where I thought, I want to be a framebuilder, I want to make my living at this. It was just natural that I got stuck into bikes because it was there that there were things needed doing.’ In his younger days, he did a lot of racing around the North East, got his pro licence, went to France for a bit. ‘I was never good. I was good, but I wasn’t good. Because I had a switch up there’ – he points to his forehead – ‘which …’ – there is a long pause – ‘… I wasn’t a winner. I didn’t want to win at all costs.’ There are two types of people who usually sign up to his courses, he says. There are the experts who have been studying the science of bicycles for a long time and who want to build something to an exact specification. And there are people like Graeme and me, who like bikes but not to the point of perversion. Graeme Symington, who teaches cycling maintenance and road safety courses in Sheffield, knows much more about frames and framebuilding than I do. He wants to make a big solid classic porteur-style bike, bombproof in its construction but elegant as well. I want to make a classic lugged-frame road bike – a 1950s sort of frame but with modern gears and componentry. Both ambitions are judged to be well within the scope of a week’s work, even though Graeme’s metalworking experience is minimal and I have none at all. Obviously, the different demands we’re making from our bikes will dictate their eventual shape and weight. Graeme’s porteur will be a copy of the strong, elegant bikes once used by messengers and delivery boys to haul newspapers or shoeshine kit round the streets of Paris or Rome. They needed to take big loads at both front and back, so they had to be very stable. They also had to be capable of dealing with all weathers and of surviving for years with minimal maintenance. Graeme intends to use his for commuting, for cycle training in schools, and for ‘coping with runs to the shop, where it needs to carry shopping for a family of three’. Porteurs – and their long-distance equivalents, roadsters – are the spiritual ancestors of hybrids, the bikes which most adults now start out on when they return to cycling. Roadsters were the classic old Edwardian bikes used both for jaunts in the countryside, long-distance touring and city errands. They were big, roomy, comfortable bikes, well made and designed to be ridden slowly but steadily all day. They wouldn’t set the world on fire, but nor would they leave anyone looking like Quasimodo at the end of the day. The modern hybrid still has the roadster’s practicality, but has borrowed elements from two other bicycle types. The better ones should have a bit of the sturdiness and adaptability of a mountain bike while keeping the speed and responsiveness of a road bike. In practice, a lot of the cheaper, less well-made ones just have the weight of a truck and that’s it. The advantage to them is that they can be loaded with panniers and racks and baskets for groceries and whatnot, and their upright riding position helps to make the rider visible. The downside is that they’re dull. Most people treat them as the two-wheeled equivalent of an estate car; the bike you use to get to and from work, do the shopping, take the kids to nursery. Practical and useful, but totally anonymous. Which is fine, because the other very useful thing about hybrids is that they make riding anything else feel thrilling. If you’ve spent five years riding round town on a heavy bike festooned with laptop bags, then the first time you get on a road bike you’re going to feel like Chris Hoy. All that time spent hauling around a lump of cheap badly-adjusted chromoly might not necessarily do you any anatomical favours in the long term, but, in the short term, it’ll do your glutes and your confidence a power of good. Meanwhile, I’m after something more lightweight. A classic road (or racing) bike is not a thing to be laden at all, but a thing made of air designed for speed and hills and huge distances. It isn’t practical in the sense of either transporting big loads or being a particularly comfortable ride, but if both bike and cyclist can be made to match each other, then a good racer is unquestionably a thing to make the soul sing. And building a steel-framed racer here will inevitably be a nod to the classic road bikes of the past. Over the past few decades, the drive for faster and lighter bikes has pushed the majority of manufacturers towards newer, stiffer materials. Steel is regarded as a heavy, spongy, tolerant substance which has enormous tensile strength but which is far too slow and unresponsive for modern racers. And so, apart from a few specialist events such as Italy’s annual L’Eroica audax, the majority of modern road bikes long ago left Reynolds 531 behind and took to aluminium, titanium or carbon fibre instead. The bikes used by pros in the Tour de France will be made from woven carbon-fibre weighing at or around the UCI (Union Cycliste Internationale – cycling’s governing body) minimum of 6.8kg. Anything lighter than that is judged to be too expensive to develop and too unstable to ride. Producing carbon-fibre bikes simply isn’t possible for small individual framemakers like Dave Yates. Since the fibres are moulded rather than brazed or welded, it requires a very different set-up to manufacture. Dave can and does make or repair aluminium and titanium frames, but for teaching purposes he likes to stick to good old-fashioned steel. Racing bike. If I’d wanted a fast bike purely for the city, I could have gone for a single-speed or a fixie. They’re the beautiful pared-down essence-of-bikes which have become increasingly fashionable for urban cyclists in the past few years. For those who live in places without many hills, they’re ideal. They don’t have racks or panniers or baskets, they don’t have derailleurs or cassettes or (sometimes) brakes. They’re just a frame, a set of wheels, and a prayer. Single speeds have one gear and a freewheel, fixies have one gear and no freewheel – in other words, the pedals will always be turning while the bike is in motion. Both are light, elegant and good for posing. In most cases they’re not about logos and branding, but about riding something bespoke. Hence the occasional double-take sight of someone blazing down the Marylebone Road on a white frame with gold rims or swanking around Hoxton on a frog-green number with hot pink tyres. Most are made of steel, which keeps the price down, but because they come without any of the bells and whistles associated with most bikes, they’re still very light. Messengers and fakengers like them because they need almost no maintenance at all apart from a squirt of lube once in a while, and everyone else likes them because they look beautiful and they get you where you want to be, fast. But since I want to climb hills – proper, grown-up hills – then I need a bike with gears: a racing bike. Once in a while, Dave gets someone who wants to make either a BMX or a mountain bike. Out there on the open market, a really good MTB with suspension at both front and rear can set you back more than a top-of-the-range modern road bike will, and an amazingly fancy one can cost you five figures or more. The money goes on the geometry. The sheer complexity of fitting suspension at both front and rear, and then in making that suspension strong enough to take anything that earth and wood and rock can hurl at it, and then in making it light enough to carry with ease, and then just for good measure making it simple enough so you don’t need a degree in aeronautics to repair it all comes at a price. The sheer pounding that a heavily used downhiller takes means that it’s no use stinting on materials: anything cheap or badly made will get destroyed by the first tree stump it meets. It isn’t that uncommon to hear downhillers complaining of getting through two or three front forks within the space of a single competition, and since the hydraulics in a good-quality fork can cost hundreds if not thousands of pounds, it’s not a sport for the parsimonious or faint-hearted. The bikes Graeme and I want to make are less demanding, and the parts are a lot easier to come by. So our first job is to come up with a series of measurements. To get a proper, comfortable ride on a bike, you need to know how heavy you are, how long your torso is, how long your arms are and what your inside leg measurement is. As a very rough rule of thumb, most men have proportionately longer torsos and shorter legs, while with women it’s the reverse. The length of your torso dictates the length of the top tube, the length of your leg dictates the length of the seat tube and the length of your arms will eventually dictate where and how you arrange your handlebars. Your weight will determine what type of materials you use. Clearly if you’re 6ft 3in., 13 stone and use your bike for doing the school run, it’s no good welding a couple of metal twigs together and hoping for the best. And so the next job is to pick out the parts we’ll need for our frames. There are four main tubes in a classic diamond-frame road bike: the head tube (the short, thick post running down from the centre of the handlebars to the top of the front wheel forks), the top tube (or crossbar), the down tube (which runs from the head tube to the bottom bracket) and the seat tube (which runs from the bottom bracket to the saddle). The forks flare out from the head tube to enclose the front wheel. At the back there are the two chain stays on either side of the rear wheel, and the seat stays, which run from the top of the seat tube to the centre of the rear wheel. Within those basics, there are a lot of possible variables. The angles will vary substantially from person to person and from bike to bike, and each type of bike has a different geometry. Mountain bikes, for instance, will have long head tubes with slacker head angles to help absorb shock. Road bikes will have a short head tube with a steep angle – usually between 73° and 74° – and an equally upright seat tube. The more upright both head tube and seat tube are, the more responsive but less comfortable the ride. The sharp angles mean that the rider has to reach forward over the top tube, reducing his resistance to the wind. The more curved the angle of the forks, the more comfortable but less efficient things will be. Road and track bikes are usually designed to be ridden with the saddle higher than the handlebars – in other words, when you’re riding it, your bum will be higher than your hands. Which is aerodynamic, but uncomfortable. According to Dave, the first and most important thing in framemaking is to find out what the bike will be used for. ‘The primary requisite is that the frame fits the rider and is suitable for the purpose. So if you want a touring bike, there’s no earthly use in making an audax bike. You can do anything on anything – you can tour on a racing bike, you can race on a touring bike, but you’ll do neither very well. So you have to get the frame to fit the customer and the purpose. If you’re going to build a track frame to ride in Manchester, the position of the track frame is completely different to a touring frame you’d make for riding around the world. With a track bike, the priorities are speed and efficiency. A track bike is not much good for anything other than riding on a track or short trips on the road. A touring bike, other extreme, you want something that’s comfortable to sit on all day, that will carry a load. A good racing bike, you steer with your backside and you think it round corners. You don’t have to physically steer it, it just goes. It’s an extension of the body and everything flows. When you’re racing at a high level, the bike is absolutely critical – the rider has to have complete confidence in it. And if there’s anything not quite right, it will affect his performance. That’s the trick in building a good frame – in getting inside a rider’s head, seeing what his or her vision is and translating that into something that’s going to do the job.’ Will a well-made bike make you a better rider? ‘No. But it will stop you being a worse rider. There are some people who will never be good racing cyclists. I’ve seen many riders with the right physical attributes, but nothing up there. They haven’t got the confidence, they haven’t got the drive to succeed. I’ve seen riders that wanted like nothing else on earth to succeed and flogged themselves almost to death. But they would never do it because they haven’t got the physical attributes – the lung capacity, the heart capacity, whatever. You’ve got to have those physical attributes, and if you haven’t got them, you’ll get to a level and that’s the size you’ll stay. And the best frame in the world won’t make a blind bit of difference. A good bike will stop you being any worse. If you put a good rider on a bad bike, he won’t ride to his full potential. If you put a rubbish rider on a good bike, he’ll still be a rubbish rider.’ He gets quite a few gear freaks, the cycling equivalent of the planespotters outside Coningsby, who love the names and numbers more than they love the ride. ‘A classic example is a customer who came to me in the early eighties wanting a frame built. He had a drawing – “Can you make that?” I looked at it. “Yeah, I can make that, who’s it for?” “It’s for me.” “It’s not going to fit you, it’s far too big for you.” ‘But that’s what I want.” “Why do you want this?” And he said, “That’s Eddy Merckx’s bike. That’s the dimensions of Eddy Merckx’s bike.” I said, ‘Yeah, but Eddy Merckx is 6ft 1in. and you’re 5ft 4in.”’ He laughs. ‘Not quite, but there was a disparity. So I made it and I sprayed it and he built it up, and I saw him for years riding round on it looking completely ridiculous – it was far too big for him. It was too long and too big. But that’s what he wanted.’ Anyway. Since the four main tubes are those which dictate the basic geometry of a road bike, they come in a variety of different shapes and sizes. The simplest and strongest will be a straightforward plain-gauge steel tube, same idea as a metal curtain pole. Next up will be single-butted tubes, which have one end thicker than the middle, thereby making the frame stronger at the point of connection. And finally there will be double- or triple-butted tubing, stronger at the ends and lighter in the middle. The strength in plain-gauge tubes will be the same throughout their length, whereas the strength in single- or double-butted tubing will be concentrated at the joints. To join these tubes together, there are two alternatives: welding or brazing. Welding raises the temperature to the point where the steel melts and joins to its neighbour. It produces practical but ugly joints – the cheap hybrids and mountain bikes you see with big gobby lumps of steel at the seams will probably have been TiG (or tungsten inert gas) welded. Brazing, on the other hand, uses another metal inserted between the two steel tubes to make a connection. It’s less heat and energy intensive and therefore less likely to damage the alloys. With brazing, you can use two methods. Either there are lugs, separate, ready-made joints which are then connected to the tubes with brass filler; or there is fillet brazing, where the joints are filed to a perfect fit, filled completely with brass and then sanded down to form a seamless connection. Fillet brazing looks beautiful but requires both time and skill, so Graeme and I are both sticking to lugs. Because over the years Dave has built up a good set of contacts among bicycle-makers, he’s already got a ready-made supply of new- and old-style lugs and tubes in stock. Having picked out the components we want, Graeme and I stand there for a moment or two, daunted. To begin with, everything is divided into a series of sub-assemblies which will then be joined together on the jig at the end of the week. First job is to file a careful mitre to the bottom of the seat tube and then to connect it to the bottom bracket (the big joint through which four tubes meet and the crank axle for the pedals passes). Having given us the necessary briefing on the uses and abuses of oxyacetylene gas, Dave gives both of us a pair of welding glasses, fits the tube and the bracket into the jig, gives it a daub of flux (to prevent the steel from oxidising), sparks up the torch and passes it over. The brass is a long, thin rod which is held very exactly over the joint until it reaches melting point. The aim is to get the brass to melt neatly and without lumps or gaps into the space between bracket and tube. This is not easy. If you don’t hold the flame over the lug and the brass for long enough then nothing will happen, and if you hold it for too long you’ll burn away the steel of the tube. The intention is to get both the heavy lug and the light brass to the same temperature so that the braze will run seamlessly between them. Both Graeme and I are so nervous before trying it for the first time that our hands shake slightly as we hold the rods. The gas hisses faintly, and half a mile away the plane-spotters steady their lenses. The lug begins to glow and the air above it shimmers. The brass bubbles, and at a point only Dave can see coming, it melts, vanishing into the gap as we pass the stick round the bracket. Dave stands over us, watching, instructing, telling us to pull away if we get too close to the tube or linger for too long in one place. Inevitably, it takes a while before we work out what the melting point looks like and how fast to move the stick around the join. But when it does go right, it is a moment of purest magic. One metal suddenly liquefies and slips sublimely in between the other as the torch flares round the circumference. When the steel cools, they are joined as solidly as if they had been born like that. All three of us become so absorbed in the work that for several hours we do not even notice that half of Britain’s air-defence capability has just passed overhead. Next is to bounce up and down on the fork blades. There are many types of curve you can give a fork, and all of them will do something to the way the bike rides at the end of the process. In theory no curve at all would send every bump and pothole from the road straight into your arms, while a very pronounced curve may make the ride too squishy and unresponsive. In practice, it’s possible to have an entirely straight fork with enough offset to give a comfortable ride. By fitting the blades into a ready-made curved jig and then leaning down on them with our full weight, it’s possible to bend them into a couple of EU-approved banana curves, giving a bit of shock absorption but not enough to slow the ride down much. The two fork blades then get slotted into the fork crown and brazed in, and after that the drop-outs (the pieces which hold the wheels and rear derailleur in place) are attached to the chain stays. All of them are comparatively small joints but tricky, since the steel is thinner and lighter, and the risk of burning a hole consequently that much greater. The slot in the chain-stay must be perfectly angled and mitred, and we seem to end up pushing a lot of brass down what looks like a very deep hole. Once the metal cools, pedants – including me – then get to spend hours filing the join down so it looks more attractive, a detail which, when the bike is completed, will be noticed by no one except other pedants and dachshunds. Then we join the head tube and seat tube to each other. To connect the two, the end of the seat tube must be perfectly filed down and mitred. If it isn’t – if there’s too much stress on one part of the joint but too little on another – then it’s the joint most likely to crack or fatigue. At this point, my choice of lugs comes back to haunt me. The ones I picked out have frillier edges than normal, and therefore need more careful brazing. Moving round them with the torch, learning the way the heat sucks the brass towards it or pushes it away, remains endlessly fascinating. We mill the end of the head tube down to the right size, stick it in the top of the fork crown and braze them together. Even at this stage, the whole thing has begun to look less like a series of GCSE metalwork assignments and more like a bicycle. And then there is the moment when, after three days and a lot of coffee, all the different bits and joints are put into the main jig and brazed together. This is the moment of truth, the point at which everything either comes together into one priceless diamond-frame or disintegrates into a load of unrideable parallelograms. The different components might all look great on paper, but no one can really tell you how harmonious it’s going to look when it’s all connected or, more importantly, what kind of ride it’s going to be. Once it’s all been brazed together, it’s left overnight in the jig to cool and settle. The following day, we take it out, poke the fork stem up through the head tube, examine our handiwork and agree unanimously that it looks like a bike. The forks are curvy, the bottom bracket proportionate and the top tube so straight you could hang pictures with it. Once in a while, I glance at the point at which the seat stays attach to the top of the seat tube. In mass-produced hybrids, the join is usually done with a big clot of weld. But in old-style racers, there should be a couple of sharp, cleanly pointed ends, like one-sided spears. Having managed to get those brazed and filed down so they come to a perfectly curved point just below the saddle is a moment of deep private satisfaction. One of the last tasks is to swap to silver solder in order to fit in the bottle bosses (the two little holes in the down tube which take the cage for a water bottle). Silver has a lower melting point than brass, and thus the flame has to be held higher and moved away quicker than with most of the brazing. But silver is good for the smaller tasks where a really clean finish is required, and for joining things to the centre of butted tubing where the steel is lighter and potentially more fragile. At the end of the week, both Graeme and I have frames. Once they have been shot-blasted and all the excess brass removed, they look as clean and professional as half the frames hanging from the rafters in bike shops all over Britain. A few months later, painted an unrestrained blood-red with gold outlines round the lugs and then fitted out by Rob Sargent in Finsbury Park, I have something I think is properly astonishing. It rides like a dream. It accelerates up hills. And, believe me, there are very few kinds of smugness greater than the smugness of being asked where you got your bike and being able to say, ‘I made it myself.’ Back in Sheffield, Graeme has a similar experience. ‘It is a bike that I can’t ride without people stopping and asking about it (might be because it’s painted bright yellow). I tell far too many people that I built it myself, an immodesty that I put down to my enthusiasms rather than my vanity.’ Sitting in the Coningsby caf? during our lunch breaks, we had stuffed ourselves with dreams of all the places our fabulous new frames would take us. I wanted to try my bike out in the hills and glens of the Scottish Borders and then see how it did in France. Graeme was mulling over the idea of a full-scale north-to-south trip down through America. But the truth of it was that it didn’t matter where we were going to take them, or why. What mattered was the dream itself. As Graeme said later, ‘There is magic in framebuilding.’ I’d felt the same. Watching Dave with a brazing torch and a stick of brass was as close as I’ll ever come to watching an alchemist at work. Not merely because there’s something occult about watching that flame scorch its white-hot pathway across the steel, but because at the end of it all we’ve been part of the transmutation of those materials from disparate parts to unified whole. And because in the process Graeme and I both learned so much about what a bicycle is and how it works. As Dave says – slightly more prosaically – making a bike is really just plumbing. But it’s definitely magic plumbing. Chapter Two You Say You Want a Revolution To get to the place where Dave Yates is now, to be able to calculate so cleanly the angles and weights that separate a mountain bike from a tourer or a BMX from a racer, takes more than just experience. It takes history. Every part and every angle of a bicycle has an ancestry, a time when something else was tried and found either to fit the purpose or to form a mechanical dead end. It doesn’t really matter if the aim of the framebuilder was to produce a bike that was light or durable or speedy – in order for Graeme and me to have built our dream machines, someone somewhere long ago had to do the R&D. The loss of a second or a gram or a millimetre of travel will always have been achieved by one man’s trial and another man’s error. And, perhaps because the history of the bicycle is relatively short and well documented, much of that history is still contentious. For as long as there are bicycles in the world, there will be people squabbling about who invented them. The truth is that it was a collaborative process – not quite invention by committee, but more a cumulative uncovering of basic mechanical principles. The British contribution was threefold: an Englishman came up with the tangential wheel and leather saddles, a Scotsman came up with crank pedals and another Scotsman working in Northern Ireland came up with pneumatic tyres. For the sake of European harmony and a quiet life, it’s easiest to agree that the French invented everything else. On the other hand, if you go to Germany they will tell you unequivocally that the bicycle came straight down the line from the draisienne, or velocipede, a heavy, wooden two-wheeled contraption without pedals or steering mechanism invented by a civil servant in 1817. In his professional life, Baron Karl von Drais was Master of the Forests in the Duchy of Baden. In his private life, he was an enthusiastic amateur inventor. His first project – a horseless carriage – had failed, but his new running machine met a more generous reception. Made out of wood and iron, it looked like a big old-fashioned version of the pedal-less bikes that children now learn to ride on. Though its front wheel was moveable, it weighed a minimum of 20kg and the only way of guiding it was to lean from side to side while pushing it along with the feet. Its unreliable trajectory meant that city riders couldn’t help straying onto pavements, while its huge weight often left them with painful ruptures of the groin. The combination of heavy fines, hernias and public ridicule was not a winning one. Even so, great claims were made on the velocipede’s behalf. Its popularity spread, and soon much of Europe knew about the new fashion. In February1869, three young men on velocipedes announced that they had managed the 53-mile run from London to Brighton in only 15 hours, a feat which would have been more impressive if someone had not shortly afterwards walked the same route in 11?. Some time later, a blacksmith from Dumfriesshire named Kirkpatrick Macmillan was arrested in Glasgow for dangerous driving. In June 1842, Macmillan was found riding along a pavement on a velocipede, knocking down a child in the process. More unusually, he claimed to have made the journey from Old Cumnock, 40 miles away, in only five hours. The secret, he claimed, was in the adaptations he had made to his machine. By adding cranks and pedals to the front axle, he had produced something which could be powered by the legs and balanced by its own velocity. Now, instead of shunting himself along, he could pedal continuously, and in doing so reach much greater speeds than were ever possible on the velocipede. His appearance had produced great interest among the locals and a visit from the Glasgow Herald. While conceding that Macmillan’s invention was ‘ingenious’, the reporter was not that impressed. ‘This invention,’ he wrote, ‘will not supersede the railways.’ But Macmillan did nothing to broadcast his new device, and in the end it was the French who successfully reinvented the wheel. Pierre Michaux in Paris, also a blacksmith, once again added cranks and pedals to the front axle of a wooden velocipede. More importantly, he published and exploited the design, and by doing so moved the bicycle one step closer to being. This time, the idea caught on. ‘Boneshakers’, as they were nicknamed, became popular among young Parisians and then throughout Europe, though, as their name implied, they weren’t a comfortable ride. Since the wheels were wooden, every jolt and bump from the road surface was transmitted directly through the frame. Mounting required a running vault into the saddle, and since the whole thing weighed at least 30kg, any misjudgements could be permanently disabling. Still, the impact on nineteenth-century society of the new contraptions was extraordinary. Charles Spencer, an early advocate of cycling, ran a gymnasium in London where novice riders could go to practise. One interested spectator recalled his reaction when one day in 1869 a man arrived at the gymnasium with a packing case containing ‘a piece of apparatus mainly consisting of two wheels … Mr Turner took off his coat, grasped the handles of the machine, and with a short run, to my intense surprise, vaulted on to it, and putting his feet on the treadles, made the circuit of the room. We were some half-dozen spectators, and I shall never forget our astonishment at the sight of Mr Turner whirling himself round the room, sitting on a bar above a pair of wheels in a line that ought, as we innocently supposed, to fall down immediately he jumped off the ground. Judge then our greater surprise when, instead of stopping by tilting over on one foot, he slowly halted, and turning the front wheel diagonally, remained quite still, balancing on the wheels.’ Track standing, or remaining stationary on an upright bike, was evidently a Spencer speciality. His 1877 guide to The Modern Bicycle moves briskly on from the vaulted mount to riding without using hands or feet. Once the difficulties of riding side-saddle had been mastered, it was time to try staying still. ‘Of course, this is a question of balancing, and you will soon find the knack of it. When the machine inclines to the left, slightly press the left treadle, and if it evinces a tendency to lean to the right, press the right treadle; and so on, until, sooner or later, you achieve a correct equilibrium, when you may take out your pocket book and read or even write letters, &c, without difficulty.’ An early cycling class. As the popularity of boneshakers spread, so the design began to progress organically, first to iron or steel instead of wood and then towards the great ‘high wheelers’ of the 1870s. Back in England at the Coventry Sewing Machine Company, James Starley and his colleague William Hillman took the design one stage further. Their new Ariel model was made entirely out of steel instead of wood and iron, a change which knocked a good 40lb off the weight of the machine. As well as an optional ‘speed gear’, Starley’s other great innovation was the tension wheel. Now, instead of spokes being laced straight from hub to rim, they were laced at an angle, thereby significantly improving the wheel’s strength and setting the standard pattern for all wheels since. To prove the Ariel’s efficacy and its excellent value at ?8, in 1870 Hillman and Starley decided to ride all the way from Paddington station in London to Coventry, a distance of 96 miles. ‘Mr Starley’s weight gave great velocity to his machine,’ one reporter noted, ‘a speed of at least 12mph being attained.’ The two cyclists reached home as the clock struck midnight, and apparently slept solidly for three days afterwards. Mr Starley’s weight was also the driving force behind another of his inventions. Since he was a large man with a substantial backside, the old saddles of wood or iron pained him. As he said, ‘There’s a lot of me to get sore.’ Arriving in the factory workyard one day, he got off his bike, plonked himself down on a pile of sand lying nearby, got up, examined the indent he had made and announced to his watching workers, ‘That’s how a saddle should be shaped – to fit the bum! Get a cast of that and make me a saddle of stout leather.’ As bicycles became lighter, so the front wheel got larger and larger. Since every turn of the cranks directly corresponded to a revolution of the wheel, the early riders had to maintain a very high cadence in order to move forward. The only way of lowering the cadence while maintaining reasonable forward momentum was to increase the size of the wheel the cranks were attached to. And so began the era of the Ordinary (or penny farthing). Huge and highly strung, Ordinaries were not for everyone. Like velocipedes, they were tricky to control and rapidly became notorious for flinging their riders off at odd moments. Most of the new guides to cycling devoted at least a chapter each to the complicated subjects of mounting, dismounting and how to fall off so you only broke the minimum number of bones. As Mecredy and Stoney, the authors of The Art and Pastime of Cycling, advised, ‘If you find you are unable to dismount because of the pace and steepness of the gradient, go for the nearest hedge or hawthorn bush, and just as you approach, throw your legs over the handles. You are sure to be hurt, but you may escape with only a few scrapes and bruises, whereas to hold on means more or less injury. If no hedge or hawthorn bush is near, throw your legs over the handles and put the brake hard on, and you will shoot forward and alight on your feet, when you must make every effort to keep on your feet and run as hard as you can, for your bicycle is in eager pursuit, and a stroke from it may place you hors de combat.’ If fractures didn’t deter people, then maybe impromptu tattoos would. Since many paths and tracks of the time were covered in coal cinders, riders who did fall off and graze themselves found that the coal dust got into the cuts. If the cuts weren’t cleaned immediately, the dust would tattoo itself in beneath the healing skin forever. ‘Some of the best racing men have been sadly disfigured about the face, elbows and knees this way.’ Such a potent combination of cost and personal hazard meant the market for the new Ordinaries was restricted mainly to the rich. Even at the tail end of the 1890s cycling craze, a new British-made bicycle could cost three months of a schoolteacher’s salary. In the end, it was a simple mechanical innovation which made the difference. By fitting a chain drive to the rear wheel instead of cranks to the front, James Starley’s nephew, John Kemp, brought the cadence down to a point where wheel sizes too could be equalised. His first design, introduced in 1884, has a 36in. front wheel and a curved down tube and crossbar. Otherwise, it looks more or less identical to a modern bike and proved so successful it became cycling’s Model T – an affordable, high-quality, mass-market product which very probably converted thousands of people to the pleasures of cycling. The bike could deliver letters, take the children to school, convey newsboys from place to place. It could be used by policemen and butchers, telegraph boys and teachers. It belonged to everyone, not just to the rich. Quick, silent, unobtrusive and requiring far less skill or maintenance than a horse, the traditional diamond-frame suddenly seemed the ideal way to negotiate the streets. Just as significant was John Boyd Dunlop’s notion of fitting rubber tyres filled with air to his son’s trike. In 1889, the first Dunlop pneumatic tyre was tested on London’s streets to thigh-slapping ridicule and the confident prediction that it would never catch on. As the popularity of cycling increased through the 1890s, so the price began to come down. Manufacturers now offered hire purchase arrangements, and the bicycle’s obvious advantages for middle- and working-class commuters brought it to the point of near-ubiquity. Back in 1869, Scientific American had foreseen the results of such popularity. ‘The art of walking is obsolete,’ it claimed. ‘It is true that a few still cling to that mode of locomotion, are still admired as fossil specimens of an extinct race of pedestrians, but for the majority of civilised humanity, walking is on its last legs.’ In America, over two million bicycles were sold in 1897 alone, and in the UK the numbers of both small- and large-scale framemakers rose from 22,241 in 1895 to 46,039 in 1897. Small framemakers found the demand so overwhelming they couldn’t keep up. Metalworkers of all descriptions took to producing frames, setting up their own little workshops in sheds and backyards at home. Larger manufacturers included shipbuilders and munitions factories – places, in other words, which already had the tools and raw materials available, and which found knocking together a few bike frames on the side an easy transition to make. The bicycle’s leisured competitors did not do so well. In the US, by the late 1890s, the sudden passion for bicycles had led to a fall in sales of pianos by up to 50 percent. Back at home, the new interest in cycling brought with it an equal interest in matters of dress and diet. For men, woollen garments were thought best, topped off with a Norfolk jacket. Other more radical innovations were less popular. One outfitter offered a wind-cutter, worn strapped to the chest and shaped at an angle like a snowplough on a train. Different types of hat were suggested, including golf or cricket caps which could be worn with a wet cabbage leaf inside for refreshing evaporation on hot summer days. To disguise scrawny legs, stockings with extra-thick knitting on the calves were offered. For racers, good, stodgy, protein-rich meals topped off with strong liquor were recommended. When in 1875 David Stanton set out to ride 100km round the Lille Bridge track, he supported himself with a combination of brandy-soaked sponge cake, mutton and tea. A couple of years later, Charles Spencer was advising racers that ‘The daily use of the cold bath, or tepid if necessary, cannot be too strongly insisted upon … and the avoidance of all rich viands, such as pork, veal, duck, salmon, pastry, &c, &c. Beef, mutton, fowls, soles, and fish of a similar kind, should form the principal diet.’ To ensure continuing vitality, it was also advised that ‘The mouth should always be kept shut. The nose is the proper organ to breathe through, and is provided with blood vessels to warm the incoming air, and with minute hairs to catch particles of dust, germs of infection, and other extraneous matter … To ride with an open mouth, besides giving one an idiotic appearance, is apt to cause severe cold, neuralgia, &c.’ Many guides advised against riding uphill. In Cycling as a Cause of Heart Disease of 1895, physician George Herschell threatened a terrible fate. Should the rider persist in heading upwards, it was almost certain that their heart would be unable to cope. ‘A time will come when it will be unable to contract effectively at all. The rider will lose consciousness, and possibly die then and there.’ As bicycles became easier to ride they became more widespread, and as they became more widespread so too did conflict with other road users. Then as now, there were many who felt that two-wheeled traffic should not be granted the same status as four-wheeled. Since in its early stages the cycling craze was limited mainly to the young and rich, pedestrians did their best to stop them either by fair means (setting the law on them) or foul (stabbing umbrellas through passing spokes). The main complaint was that they frightened the horses and, since the majority of road freight then went by horse, it could legitimately be claimed that cyclists were disrupting the commercial life of the country. In Leeds in 1893 a cyclist passing a solicitor on a carriage failed to ring his bell. The solicitor struck out with his whip, lassoed the man round the neck, dragged him to the ground and ran over him with the carriage. When fined ?30 for the assault, he was unrepentant: ‘I should do it again and let you take your luck, even though it killed you. To us gentlemen who drive spirited horses, you cyclists are a great nuisance.’ In 1882, one ‘respectable gentleman’ was fined 40 shillings for riding ‘furiously’ through London at 10mph, and when a female horse-rider became entangled with a group of racers on the Great North Road, she took her complaint to the police. Fearing that the sympathy of the public would lie overwhelmingly with the rider and that legislation would surely follow, the National Cyclists’ Union (NCU, later the CTC) took the extraordinary step of pre-emptively banning all forms of mass-start road racing from 1888 onwards. Time-trialling (individual timed races against the clock) became the only alternative. Even these were organised and conducted in an atmosphere of secrecy similar to that surrounding the acid raves of the 1990s. Would-be participants were given codes and passwords and told to turn up at some distant corner of the country wearing strange clothes at odd hours of the night. The ban was not finally repealed until the 1950s, a fact which partly explains Britain’s isolation from the rest of Europe’s racing world and its relative lack of pro-level champions. But neither legal nor practical obstacles deterred the new enthusiasts. The bicycle was quick, silent, straightforward and ideal for covering city-sized distances. It had grace and style and the thrust of modernity behind it. It could be adapted for speed or designed to take heavy burdens. It coped easily with the relatively shallow gradients of most urban hills. And always it trailed behind it an indefinable sense of boyish joy that nothing – not even the clogging stress and grime of the great industrial towns – could ever quite suppress. It also had another unexpected result: it began to be seen as a tool of socialist revolt. Together with a group of disaffected colleagues from the Manchester Sunday Chronicle, Robert Blatchford founded the penny weekly the Clarion. Blatchford was a journalist and writer whose beliefs had been strongly marked both by his time in the army and by his experience of the Manchester slums. Writing under the pen name of Nunquam (short for Nunquam Dormio, or ‘I never sleep’), Blatchford’s real brilliance was to ally strong campaigning journalism with cycling. The Clarion was distributed by cyclists, and the National Clarion Cycling Club was founded by Blatchford’s colleague Tom Groom to spread the word. Socialism and bicycles were, Groom considered, perfect bedfellows. ‘Little troubles keep him (the cyclist) sympathetic – punctures, chains that break, nuts that loosen, lamps that won’t burn etc. Runs in the country and glorious sights prevent him from becoming narrow and bigoted … The frequent contrasts a cyclist gets between the beauties of nature and the dirty squalor of town make him more anxious than ever to abolish the present system.’ The Clarion Scouts used their days off to paper their local areas with leaflets, pamphlets and copies of the Clarion, ‘nailing down lies and disposing of fables, improving the landscape by sticking up labels’. In some areas disputes arose between those who felt that the business of the NCCC should be to bring about the downfall of capitalism, and those who were much more interested in riding a bicycle as fast as possible. Despite an early move to prevent racing on the grounds that competition in any form clearly represented an attempt by bourgeois ruling forces to divide the proletariat, time-trialling did become an integral part of the NCCC. Trials would be organised most weekends, though it was, as always, conducted according to firm socialist principles: the National Racing Secretary Alex Taylor considering that ‘Our biggest asset lies in our being a working-class organisation … The knowledge that he is riding for a principle … gives new energy to tired legs.’ Even so, Robert Blatchford ended his life in disgrace with many in the movement, partly due to his support for conscription during the Boer and First World Wars but mainly for the much greater crime of writing for the Daily Mail. And the Clarion itself ended up a victim of war as readers either defected to other, redder publications, or stopped reading altogether. Besides, world politics had intervened. By the 1920s, socialism as an ideal had either been replaced by communism as a reality, or by the usual watery British pragmatism. In 1908, the aims of the NCCC were defined as ‘Mutual Aid, Good Fellowship and the Propagation of the Principles of Socialism as advocated by the Clarion’. At some point, the words ‘propagation of’ were quietly replaced by ‘support for’. Socialism, in other words, was a whole lot less fun than socialising. Other attempts to push cycling into one niche or another also failed. In the US, the League of American Wheelmen, or LAW – founded in 1880 and hugely popular in its time – was permanently tainted by its decision to prohibit the admission of black members. The decision was taken as a direct result of the success of one rider. Marshall Taylor’s father worked as coachman to the Southards, a white family in Indianapolis. The Southards had a son, Daniel, of Marshall’s age, and since the two boys played together, they also learned to ride bikes at the same time. The Southards paid for Marshall’s first bike, and he grew up with a good grounding as a cyclist. Unfortunately, the result of his connection with the Southards was predictable: his family and friends found him too white and white society found him too black. His best escape vehicle from both was the bicycle. He went to work for a local bike shop, performing tricks and stunts outside to lure customers. The job earned him both a new cycle and a new name, Major, after the military costume that he wore. His boss entered him in races which Major almost always won. The clubs and leagues that organised the races began to take notice. Some clubs (those on the east and west coasts) were happy to let a rising star compete. Some realised that the controversy generated by a winning black rider in an overwhelmingly white peloton had an electrifying effect on audience figures. But a small number of organisations wanted nothing to do with Major. In 1894, the LAW (then the main cyclists’ association with a membership of around 100,000) voted to ban black riders, including Major. He could still take part in LAW races, but only as an outsider. Despite an atmosphere of dangerous hostility, Major’s talent won out. He became World Sprint Champion in 1899 and made a triumphant tour of Europe. Back at home in the US, he found it harder and harder to appear competitively. Hotels, bars and restaurants would refuse to serve him, and Taylor eventually found the climate against him so intolerable that he gave up racing in his own country. Though the LAW’s membership declined sharply at the beginning of the twentieth century (partly as a result of their segregation policy), it took a further century for the prohibition to be fully repealed. Major Taylor. Despite becoming World Sprint Champion in 1899, Major found the discrimination against him so intolerable that he gave up racing in his own country. Meanwhile, the world itself was moving on. By the 1930s, the days when bicycles were competing only with horses and trains were long gone. Motorised transport had increased and diversified enormously. This was no longer a case of a few stately cars poop-pooping down the dusty roads preceded by flag-waving flunkeys; in the decade after 1945, the numbers of cars on the road increased threefold. In a world where an Austin Seven or a Model T cost ?175 and a bike ?5, it was evident that two wheels had lost to four. The national highways were now full of trucks, military vehicles, private cars, taxis, buses, ambulances, police cars and motorbikes. Even then, the bicycle still somehow held on. In 1950, 11 percent of all journeys were made by bike, and there remained twelve million regular cyclists in the UK. To get some idea of how awe-inspiring a figure that is, it’s worth remembering that in 2010 only 3 percent of all UK journeys were made by bike, and that was double on the previous decade. Even more peculiar, throughout that entire period the bicycle industry managed to remain healthy. In 1976, 15 percent of UK households owned a bike. By 1986, that figure had risen to 25 percent and by 1995 to 33 percent. People were still buying bikes, they just weren’t using them much beyond the age of ten. Meanwhile, back on the roads, the consequences of a complete non-policy were predictable. A 1937 Ministry of Transport survey found that a third of all road accidents involved cyclists; 1,421 cyclists were killed on the roads that year. Bicycles were not merely old-fashioned, they were fatal. Unfortunately, riders couldn’t always look to cycling organisations to support their cause. In an echo of its curious act of self-sabotage in banning mass-start racing in the 1880s, the main cyclists’ organisation, the CTC, chose to oppose the establishment of a national network of cycle paths during the 1930s on the grounds that it might interfere with their right to use roads. By the time the future of travel was being considered in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, ‘transport’ was taken to mean only ‘things with engines’. The first motorways were built and the London Underground expanded. Tram systems came and went. Beeching axed half of Britain’s railway network, and cars, instead of being a temptation, became a necessity. London’s population rose steadily through the millions. In the committee rooms of Westminster there were inquiries into the high cost of rail fares, working parties on roundabouts and Royal Commissions on buses. And the motorist reigned supreme. Until, almost without anyone noticing, something interesting began to happen. Chapter Three Feral Cycling and the Serious Men Here lies the body of Jonathan HayWho died defending his right of way.He was right – dead right – as he strolled along;But he’s just as dead as if he’d been wrong. QUOTED IN GEOFFREY BOUMPHREY, BRITISH ROADS At the Earl’s Court Cycle Show, the Serious Men are out in force. They are walking the aisles between the stalls, eyes a little narrowed, intent. They’re looking for something, even if they don’t necessarily know what it is. It could be anything – a chain ring, a new brake, even an ordinary ding-dong bicycle bell – as long as it gives them the edge, the thing which will raise them from middle-aged, middle-weight mortality to the Olympian heights of which deep down they know they are still capable. And somewhere amid the coloured rims and the briefcase panniers in matching purple leather, it’s got to be here. This, for the hard-core urban cyclist, is retail heaven, pure, gasping bike porn. It’s porn because it’s desirable and illicit and a little bit sad, and because most of these men have a private file on their laptop full of tubular things they’d like to stroke after everyone else has gone home. And because it’s porn and because they know it, the Serious Men also know that it’s essential to compensate for that knowledge by pretending to their peers that the difference between Shimano and Campagnolo is right up there with the difference between protons and electrons. For the next three days, lots and lots of cyclists come to worship here, to feed the European economy and to celebrate the fact that bicycles really are adults-only now. Most of them are dressed in normal weekend wear – jeans and trainers, the occasional hardy pair of shorts – but if you look closely, they always have one or two items of cycle gear flagged up like a password. Some have got the right sort of jacket, others are wearing the distinctive quasi-Edwardian combo of plimsolls, thick black leggings and thin plus fours. There are a few with stripy Bianchi caps and others with copies of vintage Arcore jerseys. Others have done no more than roll up the legs of their jeans or forget to take off the second bicycle clip. Quite a large number of them have long-standing hair issues: either it’s in the act of being misplaced or it’s gone completely. Others have accepted the inevitable and are now modelling the new Fall of Saigon-style helmets as a substitute. Beside the bikes out on the floor are more men, arms folded, waiting in line to give each bike an experimental lift by its crossbar. That casual heft upwards is the urban cyclist’s equivalent of dogs and lampposts, part territorial signature, part statement of intent. When demonstrated outside on the street to a bike one is sizing up or to the ride of a rival, it says two things: one, that the lifter knows enough about bikes to know that weight = cost of materials = amount of money spent = devotion to the cycling cause, and, two, that it will really piss them off if the rival’s bike is lighter than theirs. And so round the bike stands the Serious Men go, lifting crossbars with the same air of familiar authority that perhaps a hundred years ago they would have slapped the rump or checked the pasterns of an attractive yearling. The gaze of the stallholders follows them around, hopeful and assessing. They know perfectly well the Serious Men have money and that they’re prepared to spend it. The trick is to find exactly where, and how. The Cycle Show is held annually at Earl’s Court and is as good a place as any to gauge the state of the nation’s relationship with bikes. In 2008 during the financial crisis, this place had a conspiratorial quality to it, a sense that here among the long-converted there was some kind of answer to the mayhem beyond the doors. There were relatively few people and those who did appear had probably been riding bikes for twenty years or more. Then, things were still transitional. Many of the stalls still carried with them a sense that cycling was something esoteric, a throwback to a past time. There was a residual air of both apology and of defiance. This was the old campaigning face of British cycling, used to being shoved into the gutter, laughed at, written off. The stalls weren’t particularly professional and only a few places had really bothered to put on a show. The point was really just as much to hang around drinking smoothies and congratulating yourself on having got out of the petrol market before oil exploded in everyone’s faces. Two years later, there’s a different feeling. It’s more professional. More time and money have been spent, more businesses are emerging. The feeling now is that the bicycle market is a serious contender with proper money to be made and proper middle-aged incomes to be tapped. The big brands have arrived, and are putting on a show. As you walk in there’s a fenced-off area with a cycle track. It’s been done up as a kind of fantasy landscape, with a few plastic trees, a tiny little MTB area and a circuit with a lot of corners. At present, various bikes are being test-ridden. For a second, if you squint very hard, it almost looks like Amsterdam. The number of people flogging different sorts of cycle-related clothing has increased enormously; lots and lots of tasteful jackets, half a mile of black and white merino-base layers, a lot of labels involving the word ‘wicking’. There are coloured wheels and kit for triathlons. There are bullhorn bars, fancy bidons, courier bags and enough hi-visibility gear to start a building site. There are a couple of places selling assorted bits of bicycle knick-knackery (bar ends, novelty saddles) which, no matter the angle you examine them from, still somehow manage to look like sex toys. There are jackets and helmets, socks and trouser clips, bibs and shorts. There is a very great deal of Lycra. Above all, there is an atmosphere of purpose, a sense that here among the children of the new cycling revolution there are vital things to be done and said and bought, a feeling that critical mass either has been reached or is very close to being reached. None of these cyclists (except perhaps the women) looks marginal any more. By the Condor stand, where the bikes have been placed in alcoves and spotlit like exhibits in a gallery, the men stand in worship, hands behind their backs and weight on one hip. Beside the most attractive bikes, a little crowd forms. Someone strokes a crossbar, someone else gives a tyre a friendly pinch. The lights give the paint on the frames an impression of infinite depth and sparkle so the green is as green as the Emerald City. The saddles are black or retro leather, and so spare in shape they look like medieval arrowheads. In the eyes of the men are such expressions of longing that the discreet price tags beside the bikes begin to seem less like statements of fact than taunts. With that, the eyes say, you could go as fast as carbon fibre, you could go as fast as a car – maybe you could even go as fast as Armstrong. With that, you could ride right off the edge of the city and into the sky. Some of them tap the tyres one more time and then move on, regretful. Others just stay, wandering in circles round and round the different bikes, gazing. It is only when you get outside the Exhibition Centre that you come down to earth. This is London. Here on the streets of Earl’s Court there is no brave new world where the bicycle reigns supreme, and no matter how hard you squint it never looks like Amsterdam. There are certainly a few cyclists moving to and fro, but they are dwarfed by the numbers of cars, buses, motorbikes and vans. There are HGVs with busted mirrors and mothers driving battered Polos distracted by squabbling children in the back. There are van drivers with lunchtime sandwiches smearing their dashboards and couples in estate cars arguing about parking. There are dispatch riders on motorbikes overtaking bendy buses and skinny blonde women driving obese black SUVs. There are black cabs and delivery lorries, a Civic-full of ladies, minicabs and Transits. It’s the usual London streetscape, the same mixture of bricks, wind and barely suppressed impatience as probably existed a couple of hundred years ago. The cyclists who are here only slip in and out of an existing scene. In this particular area, there are no cycle lanes (unless a desultory sketch of a figure of eight in the gutter can be called a cycle lane) and no special pleading. There’s nothing here that acknowledges the bicycle or even the motorbike. If you want to cycle, then you have to do so on four-wheeled terms. The same picture extends out past the SW postcodes, through the centre, the north and the west, out past the river to the suburban hinterlands. If you try cycling in Bristol or Birmingham, Manchester or Glasgow, the geography might vary significantly but the logistics don’t. Bristol and York both pride themselves on providing for cyclists. Cambridge and Oxford have been getting students and tutors to and from lectures by bicycle for decades. Lincoln and Ipswich both look as if they were rolled out on the flatlands with nothing but cyclists in mind. But, in practice, cyclists still play second fiddle to cars in every city in Britain. But there are perks to being the transport system’s perpetual underdog. For a start, it means that officialdom’s efforts are concentrated elsewhere, so planners and people with parking tickets generally leave you alone. It also means that cyclists tend to find routes away from the main arterial roads, and thus end up with their own private transport network. Cycle through Bloomsbury, or along the many hidden canal towpaths which still join England’s cities together, or near Richmond Park, and you’ll find yourself joining if not quite a movement of population on a Chinese scale, then something astonishing. There are bicycle traffic jams by Tottenham Court Road and bicycle gridlocks on Parkway. In winter, you could sit near the major cycle lanes and watch more flashing lights pass by than in the sky near Heathrow. And because cycling is currently set up to favour the rebellious and the broke, it means that cyclists can never be homogenised into a single grey entity. One of the lovely things about riding round a city – any city – is watching other cyclists and savouring their strangeness. There is not and never has been one single urban type, and there never really could be. The figures are rising – between 2001 and 2008, the numbers of people in the UK who cycle regularly rose from 2.3 million to 3.2 million and the numbers of cyclists in London doubled – but all that rise seems to have done is to increase the diversity. Wait near a frequently used route and watch the cyclists streaming past during the morning and evening rush hours. After a bit the scene begins to appear like the Eastern Bloc countries after the fall of the Berlin Wall; many different groups jostling for dominance, a total restructuring of social politics, lawlessness, occasional outbreaks of violence, lots of exceptionally bad clothing. For every rider blazing with gadgetry, there’s another on a bike which looks as if it was cobbled together out of old chair legs and office stationery. There are packs of Ridgebacks all racing each other to the junction, there are old ladies on things which look like two-wheeled shopping trolleys, there are men in suits and pillocks on Bianchis. There are government-issue cyclists who are either very afraid of breaking the law or very afraid of being caught on camera while breaking the law, and there are those for whom the law is an entirely optional concept. There are those who ride like they belong on a bike and there are those who ride like they’d rather be in an armoured vehicle. There are those who have helmets, those who don’t, and those who sport different headgear entirely – woolly bonnets, Santa hats, things with built-in headphones. There are businessmen on space-age racers going at the same pace as girls on silver single-speeds. There are those for whom The Look evidently matters more than either The Bike or The Ability to Ride That Bike. There are people who look like they know what they’re doing, and those who are obviously bluffing. There are guys on low-riders, slung out half reclining like Dennis Hopper on a Harley, and those who have evidently forgone the stern mistress of style for the stairlift of practicality. There are those who cycle in skirts, there are those who cycle in overcoats, there are those who wouldn’t dream of cycling in anything other than six-inch red stilettos. There are fluorescent commuters on their spanking new hybrids and lardy boys twiddling along on folding bikes like elephants on beach balls. There are tourists on Boris Bikes and lots of kids of seventeen trying to get home on a BMX without being seen by anyone who knows them, and there are ladies who are Doing Their Bit for the environment. There are those who cycle with a child at either end, and there are those who prefer to load the bike like they do in Cambodia. Just like London itself, everyone is represented; every age, every class, every race and religion. Cycling here is not like cycling in either the Netherlands or India. It does not rely, as in Holland, on the knowledge that the cyclist has a legal and moral right to be there, or, as in India, on the assumption that by getting on a bicycle the cyclist has proved himself so existentially inferior that he has no rights at all. It relies instead on the principle that you must fight your own corner. Once on a bike, you realise very quickly that everyone else on the road is cleaving to an irrefutable truth: that whatever form of transport you happen to be using at that moment – car, bus, own two feet – is the only possible right one, and all other forms should cede to it instantly. You must therefore make it clear to all other road users that you too would like to arrive at your destination safely and promptly, even if you have to dance on the grave of every rule in the Highway Code to do so. Still, after only a few short weeks, it doesn’t even occur to you that the experience you have just had and the way you have therefore learned to cycle is the exception, not the rule. If you were to behave like you do here in Berlin or Amsterdam or Shanghai, you would be regarded – and rightly so – as a complete idiot. For better or worse, you have joined the ranks of Britain’s feral cyclists. Which leads on to another interesting discovery. What really bothers many cyclists is not other vehicles, but other cyclists. General traffic begins to fade from main event to mere backdrop. You realise that you have a much more pressing issue to deal with in dropping the guy on the white single-speed and making sure he stays dropped. Or riding down the man who just overtook you on a vastly inferior piece of kit. Or – most satisfactory, this – knowing the city better than the person you’re racing, taking a nifty shortcut and emerging a few hundred yards ahead of them at a crucial stage in the game. If you get five cyclists lined up in front of the lights, they may not acknowledge each other’s existence, they may never make eye contact with anything other than the pavement, but there’s a reasonable bet that four out of them will be working out how to annihilate the fifth. And if you can arrive at work having maintained the purity of your trajectory and having been overtaken by nothing but cars, then it will cheer you up for the whole day. There were many reasons behind cycling’s miraculous resurrection – the introduction of the Congestion Charge in London, a succession of scares about rising fuel costs, terrorism. On the day of the July bombings in 2005, the Evans Cycle franchise announced that they’d sold over four times as many bikes as usual. Some were sold because, with half the city’s transport links in ribbons, there was no other way of getting home, and some because what had happened that day had frightened many people so badly they were never going to go back underground. But beyond the bombings or the Congestion Charge there was something else – a more profound swell of enthusiasm for bicycles and their benefits. Government policy had nothing to do with it; for the past ten years, local and national initiatives on cycling have trailed well behind the deeper trends. Unfortunately, as politicians are now beginning to realise, by marginalising cycling for decades they have managed to turn a bunch of mild and herbivorous middle-class individuals into a bunch of fit, trained and highly assertive lawbreakers. Since cyclists were faced with a landscape which either took no interest in them or appeared keen on actively eliminating them, they had to work out how to stay safe. The solution for many was to develop a style of cycling based on a combination of mountain biking, road racing and BMX skills with a dash of gymnastics thrown in for good measure. Proper observation of the rules of the road had absolutely nothing to do with it; the law ignored them, so they would ignore the law. Or, rather, every time they got on a bike, they made the law anew on a case-by-case basis. It wasn’t like being a driver where you had to pass a test and where the way you behaved was strictly regulated by the nature of roads and other road users. If you were a cyclist, you could make a decision every time you got into the saddle about whether to cycle furiously or easily, about whether this trip was going to be about taking on the fixie at the roundabout or restricting your sense of competition to giving three taxis the finger. Some might stop at one red light because it’s a crossroads, but they almost certainly won’t stop at the next and definitely not when they’re racing someone else. They would never ride on the pavement except when it would be ridiculous not to. Some days, they’ll ride straight over pedestrian crossings, other days they won’t. Plainly, explaining to the courts that today you broke the law because you felt like it but yesterday you didn’t break it because you couldn’t be bothered is not a realistic defence. But it does make you feel a lot more alive. There is, of course, a more sinister flip side to all this. Alison Parker is a partner at Hodge Jones Allen, a London law firm specialising in personal injury. She exudes reassurance and competence, and has the kind of unforced gravitas that comes from doing and knowing your chosen subject very well for a long time. A sizeable proportion of her clients are cyclists. ‘You cycle yourself, presumably?’ Yes, I say. ‘Well, I absolutely don’t, and I wouldn’t cycle in London – I consider it to be completely suicidal. I wouldn’t do it, I just wouldn’t do it. Probably because I see too many incidents. The problem is that when a cyclist comes into contact with a very large vehicle, they are absolutely bound to come off worse.’ We meet at a restaurant near her firm, and on one of the paper table mats Parker sketches out the four classic accidents to befall urban cyclists. First is the cyclist coming down on the inside of heavy traffic. The lane of waiting traffic parts to allow a car to turn right, the car goes straight into the cyclist. Second is on a roundabout: the cyclist sticks to the outside while the car takes the inner route but then pulls across the path of the cyclist when they reach their exit. (‘Go round on the inside and indicate outwards. Or get off and walk round the roundabout – that’s my advice.’) Third is people opening car doors directly into the path of a cyclist – either the passenger door in stationary traffic, or the driver’s door in a line of parked cars. Fourth, and most notorious, is the HGV making a left-hand turn. There’s a cyclist on the inside by the curb, the HGV swings out to the right, the cyclist rides into the gap and is then crushed by the HGV as it turns to the left. Of the thirteen cyclist fatalities in London during 2009, nine were killed in this way by HGVs. Sight lines on HGVs are notoriously poor – a cyclist or a pedestrian has to be several yards in front of the cab before they become visible – and the drivers are simply unaware that there’s a cyclist anywhere close. ‘The advice is NEVER to go into that gap. It’s safer just to hang back.’ Eight of the nine HGV fatalities during 2008 were women. As cyclists, women are more cautious and law-abiding than men, and more prone to tuck themselves into corners at junctions where drivers can’t see them. The combination of physical risk and environmental smugness is a potent one, and when they first take up cycling many commuters go through a phase of almost radioactive self-righteousness. After all, if you feel you own the moral high ground and you’re doing something a little bit scary at the same time, then you might well reach the mystical god-like state called Always Being in the Right. Big mistake. After a couple of years, the best urban cyclists mellow, realise they didn’t personally invent cycling and get on with reaching their destination. The bad ones just keep arguing until someone breaks their jaw. ‘As a pedestrian in London,’ says Parker, laughing, ‘I really hate cyclists! They never bloody well stop at zebra crossings, and I’m more likely to be road-raged as a pedestrian than I ever am when I’m behind the wheel of a car. There are some very arrogant and cavalier cyclists in London who would happily mow you down. I think cyclists, particularly in cities, do have a mindset that everyone’s against them.’ After all that, it almost comes as a relief to hear Parker has an even riskier group of clients than cyclists. ‘I’ve always thought that motorcycling is a bit like smoking – if someone had realised when they were invented how incredibly dangerous they are, they would never have been allowed, a bit like cigarettes. It’s too late now. You’re on two wheels, you’ve got no stability, no protection at all round your body, and you’re sitting on 1,000cc of engine, and doing 80mph – I mean, how dangerous is that? I just find it mind-boggling every time I think about it. Stay on four wheels, or on two wheels where you’re travelling at a speed where you’re much more in control of what happens if you come off.’ Muratori’s Caf? is at the junction of Farringdon Road and Margery Street opposite the Royal Mail’s Mount Pleasant sorting office. It’s an old-style kind of caf? – a London greasy spoon with warmth and Formica but without the reek of grease. There’s wood panelling on the walls and tabloids on the benches, and once in a while someone emerges from the kitchen with a comment or a joke to refill each cup with tea. Outside the huge corner windows, the view is of rain and wet cyclists. Muratori’s has been a cabbie’s refuge for years, and this particular afternoon – slimy, cold, early Feb – the place is half full. The following lively exchange of views is interesting not because it’s unexpected, but because, for an hour or so, it’s salutary to imagine what it must feel like to be a cabbie driving in circles round London’s endless frustrations. Cabbies have always felt an enormous sense of ownership about any city they work in. They’re part of the place; London would not be the city it is without them. And since they feel they belong to these streets, then one of two things happens. Either they’re completely secure in that knowledge and very laid-back about everything, or they’re monumentally pissed off at all the things on the road that they feel don’t have as much right to be there as they do. BB: So have you ever cut up a cyclist? Les (taxi no. 30839): No! Unanimous shouting from everyone round the table: No! No, no, no! Les: Seriously! Because the last thing I want is a cyclist bashing my cab. Keith (taxi no. 30729): Because we know we’re on a loser. Even if you do nothing wrong, you’re on a loser. BB: That isn’t most people’s experience. Most people have been cut up by a cab at some point. Mickey (taxi no. 54316): Yeah, OK, but let’s say that happens, come up and talk to me, don’t bang on the wing mirror and when I get out, cycle off. I’ve seen a cab and when the guy got out, the cyclist rode round and round tormenting him because he knew any time the guy got near him he could just cycle off. Keith: They’re so aggressive, aren’t they? They bang your bonnet, bang your wing mirror and then they cycle off, they won’t stay around to argue. That’s what really pisses me off. BB: Do you think all cyclists are the same? Keith: Yeah. You can generalise with cyclists. BB: So you don’t discriminate between people who are cycling for work, couriers, and other cyclists? Keith: They’re all the same. Les: You do meet the odd one with the lights on and the yellow stuff all over and the backpacks and everything, and they generally stick to the rules. But the ones who are riding around with next to nothing on, just a bit of Lycra, zooming about delivering stuff, they will take the mickey, no doubt about it. I don’t go out of my way to get in their way, but I just find it’s hard to avoid them sometimes. BB: They’re just doing a job, same as you. Les: I understand that, but if they come up the side as they do, if you look at any of our cabs, there’ll be little scrape marks along the paintwork. Now, if I go in the garage for that, they’ll go, ?50 mate. I’m not going to get that back off them, never in a million years. And that happens every day. Paul (didn’t give his driver number): You know what it all boils down to? There’s no punishment. They don’t think the law applies to them. Steve (over at table in corner): There’s a place where all the paramedics go, the guys who deal with all the bad accidents and things, and their entertainment when they’re sitting waiting for a call is watching the traffic lights to see how many cyclists stop. They say they actually take a tally. Nine out of ten don’t bother. Les: I don’t understand why they’ve always got to push to the front. BB: Because if you don’t, you’re invisible and you’re stuck behind some trucker’s exhaust. Les: Yes, but I still don’t think, well, I’ve got to commit suicide, push myself in front of a lorry, just because I’m breathing a bit of crap. I’d sit a few yards back. Keith: There should be some sort of registration for them. I know it’s difficult and it should be free at first, but they should be registered. Because every cyclist, that’s one less car on the road, and that’s great. But you still can’t have them all banging and breaking things. Mickey: If they knock off your wing mirror, scratch the side of the cab, smash your back light, there’s nothing you can do. There’s no comeback. They just ride off. There’s no way of recognising them again. The old cabs used to have a diesel cap on the back. Many times, they just hold onto that and get dragged along by a cab rather than cycle. Les (reflectively): There’s a lot of anger, isn’t there? A lot of anger coming out of people. See, most cab drivers know we’re not going to get anywhere quickly. So we don’t drive fast. We know – I’ve had twenty-nine years’ experience of knowing I’m not going to get anywhere. We’ll get there eventually, but there’s no point in rushing. BB: But the point is, you can get somewhere quick on a bike. Keith: See, that’s the trouble. That’s their mindset – I can get past that, I can go faster, I can get across town. But they’ve still got to realise they’ve got to stop at a red light. BB: If every cyclist suddenly stopped at every red light, would you start respecting them? Les: Well, I don’t know … Keith: Get ’em off the roads. Cycle lanes, whatever, just get ’em off the roads. Les: License them. Mickey: Round ’em all up and nuke ’em! (general hilarity). Paul (looking out of the window at a couple of cyclists coming across the junction towards the caf?): Hang on, watch that – watch that! He’s coming up to the red and … (the cyclist stops). Well, he’s done it safely, but nine times out of ten they don’t. Look! Look! Guy’s just gone straight through. He’s gone through a red light. Look! He’s overtaking! BB: He’s allowed to overtake! Keith: Yes, and he’s wearing a dirty jumper. And that ain’t right (gales of laughter). We don’t like cyclists, do we? We hate ’em. Mickey: Last summer, June or July it was, there was a naked cycle ride. I was amazed, I was sitting there and there must have been a thousand of them. BB: So if all cyclists cycled naked, would it make you like them better? Keith: Yes. Definitely. They shouldn’t be allowed to cycle unless they’re naked. After an hour or so I put away my Dictaphone and get up. Keith: There you go, then. Sorry about that. Tell you what, though, we hate bus drivers more. Bendy buses. Oh, we really dislike them. So you’re not top of the list. And motorbikes. They’re third. In fact, this turns out not to be a comprehensive list. The next time I took a cab, I asked the driver what he thought of other road users. In addition to cyclists, motorbikes and bus drivers, he added Post Office vans, dustbin lorries and anyone driving a Mercedes. On a cold clear day in mid-November, Patrick Field is spreading the gospel at Speakers’ Corner. Field is in his late fifties, bundled up in a couple of well-worn jackets and a fleece hat – no helmet, no hi-vis, and what looks like a home-built bike with a plain blue lugged frame, drop bars and CDs slotted between the spokes. The only obvious concessions to safety are a very powerful front light and his red jacket. Clearly, here is a man who knows his stuff. Field has been cycling and thinking about cycling for a very long time. In addition to running the London School of Cycling, he’s known as something of a two-wheel guru, writing articles, appearing at conferences and teaching the rules of good behaviour to everyone from complete beginners to experienced racers. He knows the city very well, and he has a lot of strong opinions about it. The feelings are obviously reciprocated. At some stage London has imprinted itself on him so completely that, if you look carefully, you can probably find the route from Kingston to Stratford mapped through the lines on his face. Anyway, for today the plan is to find out about how to cycle. Not how to cycle with government approval, or how to cycle by trial and error, but how to cycle realistically. After Field has given my bike a quick check, we set off along Upper Brook Street to practise positioning. Field echoes Alison Parker: what, he asks, is the most common type of accident for cyclists? Parked cars – hitting the open door of a parked vehicle. To avoid doing so, ‘Your default position should be the middle of the leftmost lane of traffic.’ The important thing is to take a nice smooth line. If you know you’re just about to have to swing out back into the road to avoid a line of parked cars, the best thing is not to tuck yourself too far into the kerb to start with, to look behind you to see what’s coming and to make it plain either by indicating or by your trajectory what your intentions are. But here we run into another familiar issue – the way men and women behave on bikes. ‘Girls tend towards, “I’m not really here, don’t worry about me, I don’t want to be a nuisance.” That’s dreadfully dangerous because these drivers have all got busy lives and they’re distracted and they haven’t had enough rest, and if you’re doing your, “Oh, don’t worry about me” act, then you can’t be surprised if they don’t notice you at all. The other side of the coin is what we can call the male problem, and that’s, “Well, fuck you, I’m going to ride my bike.” It’s like making an enemy out of everyone else on the road. And I think that’s quite English, in a way – no one’s ever told these poor boys that they can be powerful without being furious. No one’s ever encouraged them to be a powerful friendly cheerful adult – “Yes, I do own the road, let’s share it.”’ The best thing to do is to learn to take what’s yours – the full six feet, the car-sized space on the road. You cycle at least a metre out from any parked cars, but you don’t tuck too far back in when the cars disappear. And once you start realising that you need exactly the right amount of road – not too much and not too little – then in all probability you’ll stop being scared as well. ‘The truth is that you’re not as desperate as everybody else, because you’re on a bike and if you need to hurry, you can. You can actually be generous and kind and friendly and helpful. But underneath, you can only be generous with this commodity because you’ve owned it – “This is my space, and I’m happy to be generous with it.” But if you’re only letting other people take from you, then you’re in trouble. So at the beginning, I try and encourage people to be more tough-minded than you need to be later on. You can relax into a smaller place when it’s appropriate because you know that when you need a big space you can take it right back. And, anyway, why would you want to pick a fight with someone who’s fifty times more powerful than you?’ Part of the trick, Field says, is to be visible. Many rookie urban cyclists assume that the best way to be seen is to festoon themselves with lights and colours in the hope that if they dress in head-to-toe electric yellow, the traffic will be dazzled enough to get out of the way. Unfortunately, if everyone who cycles wears the same thing, then everyone looks anonymous, and as soon as they start being anonymous they become invisible. True visibility has very little to do with wearing fluorescent vests and everything to do with the way in which you cycle. You could be lit like the Post Office Tower but if you cycle in the gutter, then no one’s going to see you. ‘What people take notice of is what attracts their attention. So your job is not to be a plastic cone, your job is to be a person. And if the hi-vis jacket helps you to be a person, that’s beautiful. But the jacket on its own doesn’t make you noticeable. What people see is your personality. So whatever helps you to express your personality is going to help.’ The most conspicuous cyclists I can think of, I say, do not own any item of cycling paraphernalia at all. Field nods. ‘If I’m driving my truck and I come up behind you and go’ – he gives my bike an ostentatious once over – ‘“That’s interesting, why a basket on the back, oh yes, leather boots, that’s an interesting idea”, or I come up behind you and go, “Get out the fucking way, you should be on the pavement”, that’s really up to me. But in both cases, you’re safe because I’m thinking about you. And, of course, there are wonderful pragmatic and humanitarian reasons to want to be popular, but if you have to choose between being popular and being safe …’ Field’s favourite role models are ‘Knightsbridge matrons. I think they’re becoming extinct because the Russians have priced them out of Mayfair and Belgravia. They don’t have to be good at riding a bike, they’re just good at being themselves. And you see them coming, and they’re not nasty about it – they probably would be in a shipwreck, but that’s another story – they’re just, “Hello! Thank you!”’ First rule, says Field, is to be able to ride a bike to a minimum standard. Next is to understand the rules of traffic, which, he says, were devised to be simple, ‘because stupid people need to be able to understand them’. Traffic is formal, and it works on the principle that no one wants to crash because crashing is painful and expensive. And ‘because they’re nice people like us and well socialised and with responsibilities and families and all kinds of stuff, but even the gangsters, even the idiots whose parents didn’t love them enough, they don’t want to run over random people. They might want to run over their enemies, but they don’t want to run over you or me. So if you give them a chance not to run you over, they won’t.’ We keep going, down Rotten Row, over South Carriage Drive and into Knightsbridge, cycling at a reasonable pace to keep warm, moving from busy main roads down quieter side streets. When we get to a convenient place to pull over, Field gives me a few more tips on safety. How you treat a red light, he says, depends on how you’re feeling about both yourself and the rest of society. ‘I tend to always stop at red lights. And the reason I like doing it is because I can show off that I can still have my feet on the pedals and my arms folded, and I’m a very vain old man, but I like doing it because I know I don’t have to. It’s like an ostentatious show – you know, I’m making a social contract with you people, I’ll follow these stupid rules, but if I do run a red light, I have to be in a hurry. The ones who make me laugh are … you know, I’m waiting at a red light, and these kids go past, desperate to move, as if their bike will explode if they stop. And then thirty seconds later, fat granddad overtakes them and I’m not even breathing heavy. The people who can’t stop at red lights aren’t happy – they don’t have the psychological resources to be themselves, so they’re infected with this anxiety, this, “I’ve got to get going.” I’m not saying I’ve stopped at every red light even today, but it’s my default, to stop.’ But, I say, there may be too many cyclists out there who have now learned to love cycling in a place where reds are considered optional. The rest of the world would still like us to stop. If possible, for good. Field is dismissive. Why try and fit into a system if that system is already faulty? ‘There’s an authoritarian optimism – if we’re really obedient, then everyone will treat us well. But when Tesco wanted to smash the Sunday trading laws, what did they do? They opened on Sundays. They challenged the law. If you want to get rid of the law, you break it. So obedience doesn’t make people respect you. That’s just stupid.’ As for the howls of protest from motorists, he reckons they’re just looking for an excuse to be angry. ‘What pisses motorists off is that they’re pissed off already. I’ve had a bus driver blowing his horn at me because he wanted me to go through a red light so he could go through a red light. The idea that, oh, I would respect cyclists if they stopped at red lights – people who say that don’t respect cyclists. And they’re looking for an excuse not to.’ He instructs me on taking a circuit of Sloane Square. It’s all stuff I’ve done before but not thought about in a systematic way – enforcing my priority, looking over my left shoulder to make sure no other two-wheelers are taking the corridor between the parked cars and me, riding like I had a right to be there. The important thing with cycling in the city, he says, is to be generous. Riding a bike is ‘about negotiating conflict, it’s about understanding what other people want, making sure they know what you want and resolving any problems that arise from that. And your abilities are your ability to be small or to be big, your ability to change your shape – these are all like stereotypically female characteristics.’ He has a technique for dealing with aggression. It’s an original one, but it makes sense. ‘Go through the traffic spreading love. In a way that’s much crueller to the idiots as well – if they come up to you going, “beep beep blah blah”, and you start swearing at them, very quickly it’s all getting a bit out of control and unstable. But also you’re giving them exactly what they wanted – to export a bit of their disappointment about the way their life turned out. Whereas if you go, “Are you having a bad day?” (in a caring voice) and you just pitch it at exactly the right point where they can’t tell whether you’re being sympathetic or taking the piss so they don’t know how to respond, you actually give them a chance to grow. Which is a bonus.’ He smiles. ‘It’s so nice,’ he says reflectively, ‘to have something that’s completely under your control. You know, if bin Laden is blowing up the Blackwall Tunnel as we speak and there’s going to be a traffic jam from London to Birmingham, it’s not really going to be a big problem for us. We can carry on.’ With that, he presents me with my Dictaphone. ‘It says on the screen here, oh, for God’s sake, shut up, you boring old bastard.’ I cycle northwards, wondering if I should have a flashing front light. After a bit, I stop wondering. It goes on flashing. Like the city it belongs to, Field’s version of cycling is a pungent mixture of pragmatism, tolerance, experience and moral politics. If you start cycling in most British cities, experienced cyclists will often tell you to think and behave completely defensively. Field doesn’t do that. Defence plays a part, but so do openness and a sense of being permitted to take up exactly as much room in this world as you need. It’s a novel concept. Or, rather, it seems a novel concept on the streets of London. But in other parts of the world, there are places which are much better than this – and much, much worse. Chapter Four The Great Wheel At some point during your early education you learn the world’s countries. Africa is hot, Antarctica is cold, America is powerful and the Falklands are ours. And the Netherlands are flat. There may be other details – canals, dope, clogs, tulips – but the one overriding reality is that in all of its 16,000 square miles it doesn’t have two lumps to rub together. Even so, it’s only when you actually arrive in the Netherlands that those old facts come alive. Looking out of the train window at the countryside – fields of potatoes, barns, cows – you finally grasp what ‘flat’ actually means. Flat means not a hummock, not a summit. Flat means a country of angles and rules, a place where a road or a canal could, if it so wished, go right over the horizon and straight on till morning. Flat means there are no fast or slow bits, no freewheeling, no challenging a gradient. Flat means that you don’t need gears. At all. Ever. Flat means that in order to climb anything more than stairs, you have to leave the country. For anyone used to a countryful of curves, flat is really, astonishingly, completely flat. Of course, the Netherlands are flat because the ocean is flat, and in this part of the world earth replicates water. This is a borrowed land, a surface taken field by field from out of the sea, a place that only exists at all as a great collective act of faith. ‘God made the world,’ as the saying goes, ‘but the Dutch made the Netherlands.’ Almost a third of the country is below sea level, protected by a system of dikes and embankments. Half of it wouldn’t appear on a map at all if the Dutch hadn’t spent several millennia putting it there. That they did so – and that two-thirds of the population still lives, so to speak, underwater – is testimony to the Dutch love of heavy engineering. Spending time in the Netherlands feels remarkably similar to how things must have felt in Britain during the heyday of the Victorians. There’s the same sense of flexibility to things, the sense of great practicality married to infinite possibility. After all, if you have a country with no hills and almost no natural features, then you can start from scratch. You can have towns and cities, heaths and dams. You can build bridges, embankments, locks and level crossings. You can slap down an airport runway absolutely wherever you like. You can have fields the size of six football pitches and motorways without bends. You can have enormous wide roads covered in clever asphalt which makes less noise than the ordinary stuff. You can plough your fields with water, or you can make them harvest wind. You can have forests, and then you can chop down all your forests. And then, having noticed belatedly that everything looks weird and that you have no windbreaks, shade, oxygen or building materials, you can grow your forests back. When threatened, you can make your country an island, or drown out your enemies. You can have cycle lanes larger and better maintained than the average British B-road. You can have kids believing that a race down the slope of a subway underpass proves their prowess as a grimpeur. You can walk down the street one week and find it gone when you come to walk back. You can live in a mythical place where things – houses, shops, motorways – appear one week and vanish the next. The Netherlands may be notoriously stable and prosperous, but it also has to be the most changeable place in Europe. And, in a country without summits, there can be absolutely no possible reason not to cycle. In fact, the only puzzle is why it took someone (or several people) so many centuries to get around to inventing the bicycle, given that this reclaimed landscape appears to have been designed specifically with two wheels in mind. But, strangely enough, the Dutch did not take to the bicycle immediately. In common with the rest of Europe, the middle classes caught the velocipede craze sometime back in the 1870s. For a while, it became fashionable to be seen making journeys into the countryside on the new contraptions. Unfortunately, in many rural areas, a lot of people who saw them didn’t like them. Velocipedists found themselves under attack, targeted by locals who lay in wait and hurled stones or coal at them. Certain areas became notorious for attacks. Round Delft, where cyclists were blamed for putting the cows off their milk and making the horses run wild, they were forced to band together and ride in groups in order to pass safely. Despite such deterrents, the Dutch cycle industry grew rapidly from the 1890s onwards. Since by then it was the British who had the strongest and best-developed market in bike design, Dutch framemakers either copied them or imported from England. In 1895, 85 percent of all bikes bought in the Netherlands were from Britain; the vestiges of that influence can still be seen in the solid, gentlemanly shape of a traditional Dutch bike even now. Demand eventually became so strong that British manufacturers couldn’t cope, and an increasing number of local framemakers stepped in to fill the gap. By the turn of the century, the bicycle was the dominant mode of transport for most of the country. A network of cycle paths was established and the major cities began to incorporate bicycles into their traffic plans. The home-grown industry began to develop; in tandem with the independent framemakers – who, as in the UK, were often blacksmiths or metalworkers by training and therefore had both the skills and the materials to hand – big brands like Gazelle and Batavus started to emerge, churning out large numbers of good-quality bikes for a growing market. To the Dutch, cycling just made sense. It suited the size of the country and the fact that so much of it was urban. Bicycles became cheap and ubiquitous enough that almost every member of a family could have one, parents using them to commute or to fetch provisions, children to get to and from school. Since they didn’t need elaborate gears, there were very few parts to get rusty, and since they didn’t need to climb, they could sit down solid on the road. They could be left out in the rain for days without rusting and, since all bikes had dress guards, there was no chance of getting one’s clothing messed up in the spokes. Almost all were designed to be ridden fully laden. Конец ознакомительного фрагмента. Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес». Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию (https://www.litres.ru/bella-bathurst/the-bicycle-book/?lfrom=688855901) на ЛитРес. Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.