In 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 ReadingWide, smooth cycleways adjacent to main roads but separated from cars and pedestrians. Perpetually-lit, airy, safe underpasses beneath roundabouts. Direct, convenient and attractive cycle routes designed not by car-centric town planners but by a transport engineer who cycled to work […]
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 […]
Continue Reading“There are certain districts and streets in which certain types of vehicles are suitable, but the Thames Embankment is not, we submit, the place for horse tramcars. To disfigure the most magnificent boulevard in Great Britain, if not in Europe, […]
Continue ReadingThis poem seems to show that the late Victorian middle-class bicycle boom was well and truly over by 1897. In fact, cycling continued to be a popular form of leisure and transport for some of the moneyed classes through to […]
Continue Reading“Cycling as a ‘sport’ is exhausted and ceases to attract, for the simple reason that a bent-backed man clothed in curious garb running round and round on a track is not of itself an exciting thing, neither does it prove […]
Continue ReadingThe cartoon below is from a light-hearted book on road safety, first published in 1935, You Have Been Warned: A Complete Guide to the Road by Fougasse and McCullough. The line drawings were split across a number of pages; I’ve […]
Continue ReadingJohn Galsworthy, the Nobel Prize-winning author, was brought up in Kingston upon Thames, close to the start of the “most famous cycling highway in the world.” Born in 1867, he would have been in his mid-twenties when the Ripley Road […]
Continue ReadingLooking at this 1890s cycling map of England it’s striking that it’s probably not motorways that have had the most visual impact on our landscape but the tarmac-strangulation of towns and cities. Before ring roads diverted (mostly) motorised traffic around […]
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