In 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 ReadingOn Friday, the Department for Transport finally woke up to the dangers of speeding motor vehicles: “Urban roads by their nature are complex as they need to provide for safe travel on foot, bicycle and by motorised traffic. Lower speeds […]
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 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 […]
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 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 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 Reading