The remote College valley in Northumberland National Park famously restricts car use: the valley’s two asphalt roads are privately owned and those who wish to get about by motorised means have to apply for day permits, at £10 a car. […]
Continue ReadingThe micro-infrastructure, that is. Britain’s bike paths are famously comically bad, but English aggregates – the little stones enrobed in asphalt – are in demand across the world. Specifically, some little stones from a quarry in deepest Northumberland. They’re naturally […]
Continue ReadingThis is Hanover Street in Newcastle upon Tyne, close to the Quayside, and once lined with bonded warehouses. The road was constructed in about 1841. Most of the road is made up of small granite setts but, to aid horses […]
Continue ReadingAssassins who fret over telescopic rifle sights or the latest undetectable poisons would be better to run down their prey with a car. Kill with a gun, expect jail-time; kill with a car and more times than not you’ll walk […]
Continue ReadingMany modern motorists glibly profess their hatred for cyclists. The automobilists of the early 1900s had no such issues with cyclists. This was because many were cyclists too, or had been cyclists before taking up motoring. The first motorcar racers, […]
Continue ReadingIn 100 days from today the cycling road race of the London Olympics could see Mark Cavendish win gold for Britain. At the London Olympics of 1948 the Mark Cavendish of his day bagged silver medals on the track, but […]
Continue ReadingAt just after 11pm on March 6th 1896 the first motorcar on the streets of Detroit was piloted to a stop on Woodward Avenue. This car was driven by its builder, 28-year old mechanical engineer Charles Brady King. King’s horseless […]
Continue ReadingAn otherwise positive article in today’s Telegraph neatly illustrates how much has been forgotten about the important role the bicycle played in the 19th Century. William Langley’s article about MAMILs on carbon composite bicycles, and cycling becoming the “most fashionable […]
Continue ReadingRights of way in England are a layer upon layer accretion of the comings and goings of people, and animals, over the space of hundreds, in some cases thousands, of years. They describe a rich history of communication, of movement. […]
Continue ReadingDuring the oil crisis of the mid-1970s, the Austrian philosopher Ivan Illich published ‘Energy and Equity’, a polemic that argued apparent advances in speed were nothing of the sort, when other factors were taken into account. Fast cars weren’t as […]
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