The first cycle paths in the UK were installed (badly) in the 1930s. However, the idea for such dedicated ways – segregated and swept, even – was first proposed in 1821. Given that what we would recognise as a bicycle […]
Continue Reading“No other country has done more for the pleasure and comfort of its wheelmen than Denmark,” said a news piece in The Wheel for February 19th 1897. The American magazine was quoting from an earlier editorial in the New York […]
Continue Reading“I imagine that one fine morning we shall wake up with apparatus ready to take us to our offices by an automobile carriage…But…I cannot conceive our active Americans adapting themselves to the pursuit of pleasure in carriages moved…by any other […]
Continue ReadingI’ve just left the stimulating Cycle City conference in Birmingham. 450 delegates from across the UK – and the world, in fact – came together to chew the cycling fat in a number of seminars and talks, some held in […]
Continue ReadingMarket-leading crowd-funder Kickstarter recommends you spend two weeks or so crafting and honing your campaign. I agree, and add that most of those two weeks will be spent in a maelstrom of self-doubt. Or maybe that’s just me? In this […]
Continue ReadingCities are living, breathing, evolving entities. British ones are rammed with cars right now. As I wrote on the Guardian Bike Blog yesterday, this isn’t necessarily how it will be in the future. Cities can be reshaped. And not just […]
Continue ReadingArthur T. Poyser of the Cyclists’ Touring Club wrote a series of itinerary-style touring books for the organisation he worked for. The British Road Book, produced in 1897, came in five volumes, covering the whole of Great Britain. Scotland was […]
Continue ReadingThis 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 […]
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