This Saturday sees the fifth annual staging of the Tweed Run, in London. Riders will be entertained by the legendary, 1960s-vintage Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band and judged on sartorial elegance by tailors on Saville Row, who come out en masse […]
Continue ReadingThe rosy cheeks may have been the result of imagined exertion along this improved, macadamised road in Detroit but the mascara and the lipstick seem to suggest the artist wanted to portray this fictional young rider as a confident, independent […]
Continue ReadingVictorian touring cyclists from Britain often complained about the rough granite setts used in Belgium, setts now famous as the pavé to be found on about 50kms of today’s Paris-Roubaix road race. 19th Century cyclists preferred macadam surfaces (small stones […]
Continue ReadingCollaborative mapping resource OpenStreetMap was created in 2004 as the ‘wikipedia of maps’. Much of the early digital mapping was crowdsourced by geek-cyclists. OpenCycleMap, Cyclestreets, and smartphone apps such as the one I commissioned for BikeHub, are initiatives that prove […]
Continue ReadingEast Grinstead in 1907 doesn’t look terribly swamped with motorcars and would have probably been even less so three years earlier. This was when Sir William Thomas Charley shuffled off this mortal coil. The 71-year old died on a hot […]
Continue ReadingAA President Edmund King is hot on dispelling the myth that motorists and cyclists come from different planets. In a ‘Two Tribes’ presentation given to a road safety conference he said: “We really must get past this dangerous ‘them and […]
Continue ReadingMany of the things we consider ‘modern’ about cycling – even basic things such as anti-puncture gloop or hi-viz clothing – were available to Victorian cyclists. Below are a number of products from the 1890s which you may not not […]
Continue ReadingIn the 1890s, in both Britain and America, the bicycle was widely used in political campaigns. The League of American Wheelmen was a highly influential organisation at the time. It was non-partisan, bestowing its favours on whichever politicians would promise […]
Continue ReadingIn June 1905, a car carrying US president Theodore Roosevelt was stopped for speeding, by two policemen on bicycles. The car was a Columbia, made by the same company that, in 1877, had brought the first high wheel bicycle to […]
Continue ReadingOne of the most fatal mistakes that can be committed by the owner of a bicycle is accomplished when she entrusts the treasured possession to the temporary care of the servant. With the best intentions in the world, the ordinary […]
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