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The Freedom of the City
by Ken Worpole

photo (c) Sue DarlowMost people will never cycle round the world, meet exotic peoples and bore them stiff with the finer points of chainring clearances.

Holidays apart, most cyclists use their bikes every day to get to and from work, to the pictures or to the pub. But this doesn't mean that there isn't much pleasure and interest to be had from the daily run, or that the interests of the working cyclist should be marginalised in the glossy magazines. Over the past decade I estimate that I've cycled nearly 20,000 miles -- enough to get me to the Andes and back, but it's mostly been in north London and, more specifically, within five miles of Highbury Corner and the Holloway Road. And I've enjoyed nearly every mile.

That's the point about cycling; it's not so much where you go as the sheer range of experience that cycling brings to any journey.

For me cycling is, as the philosopher Wittgenstein (a bicycle owner himself) might have put it, another way of 'being in the world'. It's an intensely physical form of transport, and brings into play nearly all the senses. This makes cycling the ideal way of travelling in a city like London that is itself kaleidoscopic and in a process of continual change and transformation. A back street route from Hackney to Kings Cross can be partly derelict one year and gentrified or radically cosmopolitan the next; the demolition of an old cinema can suddenly transform an urban panorama. Yesterday's office block suddenly becomes today's archeological dig.

The graffiti and flyposting on the walls and fences keeps you constantly in touch with the latest political outrages, community festivals and jazz gigs. The urban street is a living newspaper and the city itself is a form of instant communication: cycling is the best way to read and understand it. As someone who earns a living writing about urban policy, there is no other way to travel. In my opinion, colleagues who drive to work, are travelling blind.

The metropolitan cyclist can improvise a new route almost every day, using a mixture of roads, canal towpaths, and bus lanes. In doing so he or she can participate in the daily life of the city more fully.

Over the years I have some across a number of free events in parks, political demonstrations (some of which I've got off my bike to join), street theatre performances and outdoor filming for TV and films. Unhappily, I have also witnessed accidents and fights.

But because I use a bike to cycle around the capital I've been able to buy stand-by theatre tickets or returns for the same day's performance, on impulse. I've seen herons fishing near Wood Green, foxes sedately walking by the railway line in Stepney, and swans flying in formation across the Hackney Marshes. And of course, there was the dead bear....

The car, bus or tube passenger simply doesn't have the flexibility or control over such transport to do or see these things; you cannot ask the bus driver to stop for five minutes outside a theatre while you ask about returns. The city cyclist, however, is always on the case.

The urban cyclist also travels in time, able to take advantage of having just two wheels to negotiate a way through the paths and alleys of the older, more historic bits of London on the journey from one modern building, or district, to another. Likewise a canal towpath gives you a unique view of the backs of the many beautiful 18th and 19th century buildings lining the canals while the frontages are often aluminium and plastic facades disguising the real architectural qualities hidden beneath. And even on London's neglected canal system, the 19th century hand-operated locks and paved towpaths continue to provide a reminder of transport in less manic times. An era in which a flotilla of barges could transport a shipment of grain or timber though London to Birmingham noiselessly and efficiently. A journey which today would take a couple of hundred overloaded, road-wrecking lorries thundering through the streets of central London, wreathed in dust and smoke.

I admit that I'm lucky. As a freelance worker, I don't have to do the same journey every day, though I do have many fairly regular runs. The longest journeys have taken me through multiracial communities and cultures, through the futuristic landscape of London's Docklands, the measured and urbane uniformities of Hampstead Garden Suburbs to the bleak wastes of the Greenwich peninsula -- abandoned gas works and all.

Taxi drivers have even asked me directions, assuming, often correctly, that it is the city cyclist who knows the minutiae of a city's geography and topography better than most. The cyclist is the true 'flaneur' or dandy of the modern city, intimately acquainted with all its multifarious ways. You only need a three-speed gear and pothole-proof wheels to be one.

There are dangers, of course, though I've never had an accident. I've had my handlebars snap after hitting a pothole, and a rear wheel stolen. That's all.

The real enemies are cars, vans, and lorries, but particularly vans. The only thing worse than having to read the Evening Standard (whose editorial line seems to be that all cyclists are closet Bolsheviks or Black September terrorists in Lycra), is having to avoid that newspaper's delivery vans as they hurtle through the afternoon streets, scattering pedestrians and cyclists like pigeons. Yet, I have to admit that Royal Mail vans are possibly worse. They are driven as if in practice for Le mans. They are indifferent to all road sense and safety and the concerns of other road users. Yet it often takes two days for a first class letter to travel two miles in London. There's an Aesopian moral there somewhere.

I cycle in my ordinary clothes, or whatever is needed for the job I happen to be doing. I have a real aversion to the DayGlo 'leisure clothing' that seems to be displacing even bicycles from the bike shops these days, making it look as though everybody has been dressed by Mothercare, or has perhaps stepped off the set of Blue Peter.

Cycling is quintessentially the proper mode of transport in a civil and democratic society. It is the means to an end, not the end itself.

 

© Ken Worpole
New Cyclist, January/February 1992

other stories by K Worpole

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