A bike shadow around the corner from 2 Bloomsbury Place
I remember being given my first bicycle, in the 1950s, on the farm outside Limavady in Northern Ireland. I remember getting aboard and hurtling down the bumpy drive, across a (happily not then very much trafficked road) and into the hedge on the other side.
I learned about brakes later that day.
Over the years, cycling has given my huge joy, not least when Kensington Gardens and Hyde Park were opened up to cyclists. In the process, as with many migratory birds, my commute got steadily longer. In the early 1970s, it was from Covent Garden to the Belgrave Square area. When we moved to Barnes in 1975, it took me until the early 1990s to get back into longer haul cycling, initially to the Notting Hill area (when SustainAbility moved there), then Kensington High Street, then Knightsbridge, then Bedford Row in Holborn, and (when we founded Volans) Bloomsbury Square.
As noted below, for much of this time there was an undeclared war between drivers and cyclists, with the result that in around 40 years of cycling I have been left unconscious in the road no less than four times.
My trusty companion through the past 25-plus years has been a Dawes (appropriately named, as it turned out) ‘Mean Streets’ bike, which is pretty heavily built, but its crossbar still shows the scars of the second major accident. Strikingly, another cyclist slowed down alongside me as I pedalled north parallel to Park Lane a few years ago, and offered to buy the bike. I was pleased, of course, but couldn’t imagine parting with it.
Cycling 1: In over 40 years of cycling in London, I have been left unconscious four times, twice with three broken ribs. In 1975, an Indonesian man hit me in Covent Garden. In the 1990s a car without lights drove into me in Lonsdale Road in the midst of a downpour at night, and didn’t stop. In 2006 I was hit by a Mongolian woman in Olympia—adding insult to injury by driving into me while I was in a cycle lane. Then, in 2013, three young men in a car hit me from behind in Berwick Street, semi-deliberately, then fled the scene. A long queue of witnesses formed, the case went to trial and the driver paid the penalty. Even so, cycling remains one of my greatest joys.
Cycling 2: … as this everything-is-illuminated moment in Hyde Park symbolizes
Cycling 3: And this could be a symbol of my working life. A bicycle made for 10—snapped in Brazil