East 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 ReadingEE is trying to sell folks its 4G service by using fast athletes on slow modes of transport. “You wouldn’t put Steve Redgrave on a pedalo” is one of the treatments, the other is this take on “penny-farthings” (purists prefer […]
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 Reading“Our weather is such that for at least one quarter of the year we must cycle at home or not at all,” stated a correspondent to the short-lived The Rambler weekly cycling magazine in 1897. “Most of us do not […]
Continue ReadingCopenhagen has superlative bicycle infrastructure, with those beautiful Danes famously photographed in all weathers by the dogged Mr Cycle Chic, but there’s a location in the Danish capital where it’s possible to cycle in even the fiercest of snow storms. […]
Continue ReadingDaniel Defoe, author of the 1719 novel Robinson Crusoe, was a great traveller and, in 1724-6, wrote A tour thro’ the whole island of Great Britain, divided into circuits or journies, a valuable source of information for historians. Defoe had […]
Continue ReadingThese are three of the job descriptions given by respondents to the Census of the Population of England and Wales on 4th April 1881. When an overview of the census was published two years later the authors of the General […]
Continue ReadingLudicrous, really. There’s a blanket national ban on cycling on the pavement (and has been since 1888) but there’s a confusing mish-mash of conflicting laws which means there’s no equivalent national blanket ban on parking a car on the pavement. […]
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