“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 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 […]
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 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 ReadingI’ve been hanging out at Tyne and Wear archives recently, requesting to see plans of Newcastle’s streets from the 1830s through to the 1930s. While the Roads Were Not Built For Cars book is international in scope, it’s instructive to […]
Continue ReadingNovelist H.G. Wells was a cyclist before the peak of the bicycle craze in 1896 and continued to ride until at least 1901 when he and his second wife went on a cycling tour of the southern counties. In letters […]
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