The new visitor centre at Stonehenge opens this week and the new Twitter account is already live. From tomorrow you won’t be able to park a car near to the hallowed stones, you’ll have to take a shuttle bus from […]
Continue ReadingMy (very) forthcoming book has a long, detailed article about the cycling back-stories behind a great many automobile brands, including GMC, Ford, Land Rover and 77 others. I’m including a quote from libertarian American satirist P.J. O’Rourke. He’s not a […]
Continue ReadingColonel John Jacob Astor was an interesting chap. Stinking rich, too. He was one of the wealthiest men of America’s Gilded Age. Educated at Harvard, he thought highly enough of his own literary talents to write a science fiction novel. […]
Continue ReadingToday, there’s a justifiable concern that HGV drivers on piece-work are causing havoc on London’s roads. In 1898, there were similar complaints. About bicycle-riding “scorchers”. Note: the scorchers may have hit pedestrians but they didn’t tend to kill them. “One […]
Continue ReadingIt’s 1893. Road locomotives, such as the newfangled motorcar, cannot be practically driven on the queen’s highway (they’re not street legal for another three years). The fastest thing on the roads is still the bicycle. But a dip in bicycling’s […]
Continue ReadingJean-Jacques Sempé – France’s most celebrated cartoonist – likes bicycles, perhaps because one of his first jobs was delivering wine by bicycle through the rolling hills of the Gironde. He has drawn them many times, most famously for The New […]
Continue Reading1930s press baron Lord Beaverbrook said Alfred Harmsworth was “the greatest figure who ever strode down Fleet Street.” It might have been more accurate if Beaverbrook had said “rode down Fleet Street” for Harmsworth was an enthusiastic cyclist, familiar with […]
Continue Reading“No one who has lived in London can doubt that the pressure on the streets is getting yearly heavier and heavier, and becoming more and more unmanageable.” That was the conclusion of civil engineer Sir John Wolfe-Barry, the son of […]
Continue Reading‘Madeline’, promised anonymity, wrote the following to American weekly magazine The Bicycling World, 17th December 1880: “My window looks out upon a street that seems to be a favorite bicycle route, or at least a favored one, and the appearance […]
Continue ReadingStephen Kempton was crushed beneath the wheels of a heavy motor vehicle – a large electric cab – in the winter of 1897 on Stockmar Road in Hackney. He was nine years old. Upon being told the gory details, a […]
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