For many women, the Safety bicycle of the 1890s enabled escape. Escape from kith and kin, escape from the strictures of late Victorian society, escape from tight corsets and voluminous dresses (bloomers weren’t invented for bicycling but so-called ‘Rational dress’ […]
Continue ReadingThirty miles of protected bike lanes have been opened in Chicago, part of a planned, 645-mile network of joined-up on-street bikeways. This is impressive, but it’s not new. Chicago was once certifiably bicycle-mad. For a few brief years in the […]
Continue ReadingAutomobiles existed in the 1890s but they were crude, dirty, expensive, hard to drive, and prone to mechanical breakdowns. The transportation revolution of the age was the bicycle. Eleven years after the introduction of JK Starley’s Rover Safety bicycle and […]
Continue ReadingIn the late 1890s, Britain’s biggest tobacco company was the main sponsor of a chain of Cyclists’ Chalets. There were plans to build a chain of 500 such chalets, all part sponsored by W.D. & H.O. Wills. Only 40 are […]
Continue ReadingJK Starley is generally considered the creator of the modern bicycle. According to the editor of The Cyclist, a contemporary magazine, Starley’s Rover Safety bicycle “set the fashion to the world,” leading to a global boom in bicycle ownership. Commenting […]
Continue ReadingA FORECAST In the spring of 1913 St. John Skinner came back from Africa, after spending nine or ten years somewhere near the Zambesi. He travelled up to Waterloo by the electric train, and the three very stout men who […]
Continue ReadingIt’s ironic, but the law that states cyclists shouldn’t ride on pavements is the same law that could be used to prevent motorists from parking on pavements. Which is the greater social ill? If you believe vitriolic letters in local […]
Continue ReadingWith Olympic cycling champions coming out of our ears it’s easy to forget that before Chris Boardman’s victory at the Barcelona Games, no Briton had cycled to gold since 1920. Boardman’s crushing pursuit victory kick-started a revolution that eventually made […]
Continue ReadingImagine, if you will, War of the Worlds in reverse. Imagine not a destructive alien invasion, but a constructive one. Imagine giant space-ships sucking up all of the wonderful bike paths in the Netherlands and depositing them in the UK, […]
Continue ReadingIn last week’s Sunday Times, the newspaper’s ‘motormouth’ correspondent Mike Rutherford wrote: “Parking is now officially, in my book at least, one of the undisputed rip-offs of the decade.” He claims he will no longer pay for “heinously expensive spaces” […]
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