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ОглавлениеChapter Three
Feral Cycling and the Serious Men
Here lies the body of Jonathan HayWho died defending his right of way.He was right – dead right – as he strolled along;But he’s just as dead as if he’d been wrong.
QUOTED IN GEOFFREY BOUMPHREY,
BRITISH ROADS
At the Earl’s Court Cycle Show, the Serious Men are out in force. They are walking the aisles between the stalls, eyes a little narrowed, intent. They’re looking for something, even if they don’t necessarily know what it is. It could be anything – a chain ring, a new brake, even an ordinary ding-dong bicycle bell – as long as it gives them the edge, the thing which will raise them from middle-aged, middle-weight mortality to the Olympian heights of which deep down they know they are still capable. And somewhere amid the coloured rims and the briefcase panniers in matching purple leather, it’s got to be here.
This, for the hard-core urban cyclist, is retail heaven, pure, gasping bike porn. It’s porn because it’s desirable and illicit and a little bit sad, and because most of these men have a private file on their laptop full of tubular things they’d like to stroke after everyone else has gone home. And because it’s porn and because they know it, the Serious Men also know that it’s essential to compensate for that knowledge by pretending to their peers that the difference between Shimano and Campagnolo is right up there with the difference between protons and electrons. For the next three days, lots and lots of cyclists come to worship here, to feed the European economy and to celebrate the fact that bicycles really are adults-only now. Most of them are dressed in normal weekend wear – jeans and trainers, the occasional hardy pair of shorts – but if you look closely, they always have one or two items of cycle gear flagged up like a password. Some have got the right sort of jacket, others are wearing the distinctive quasi-Edwardian combo of plimsolls, thick black leggings and thin plus fours. There are a few with stripy Bianchi caps and others with copies of vintage Arcore jerseys. Others have done no more than roll up the legs of their jeans or forget to take off the second bicycle clip. Quite a large number of them have long-standing hair issues: either it’s in the act of being misplaced or it’s gone completely. Others have accepted the inevitable and are now modelling the new Fall of Saigon-style helmets as a substitute.
Beside the bikes out on the floor are more men, arms folded, waiting in line to give each bike an experimental lift by its crossbar. That casual heft upwards is the urban cyclist’s equivalent of dogs and lampposts, part territorial signature, part statement of intent. When demonstrated outside on the street to a bike one is sizing up or to the ride of a rival, it says two things: one, that the lifter knows enough about bikes to know that weight = cost of materials = amount of money spent = devotion to the cycling cause, and, two, that it will really piss them off if the rival’s bike is lighter than theirs. And so round the bike stands the Serious Men go, lifting crossbars with the same air of familiar authority that perhaps a hundred years ago they would have slapped the rump or checked the pasterns of an attractive yearling. The gaze of the stallholders follows them around, hopeful and assessing. They know perfectly well the Serious Men have money and that they’re prepared to spend it. The trick is to find exactly where, and how.
The Cycle Show is held annually at Earl’s Court and is as good a place as any to gauge the state of the nation’s relationship with bikes. In 2008 during the financial crisis, this place had a conspiratorial quality to it, a sense that here among the long-converted there was some kind of answer to the mayhem beyond the doors. There were relatively few people and those who did appear had probably been riding bikes for twenty years or more. Then, things were still transitional. Many of the stalls still carried with them a sense that cycling was something esoteric, a throwback to a past time. There was a residual air of both apology and of defiance. This was the old campaigning face of British cycling, used to being shoved into the gutter, laughed at, written off. The stalls weren’t particularly professional and only a few places had really bothered to put on a show. The point was really just as much to hang around drinking smoothies and congratulating yourself on having got out of the petrol market before oil exploded in everyone’s faces.
Two years later, there’s a different feeling. It’s more professional. More time and money have been spent, more businesses are emerging. The feeling now is that the bicycle market is a serious contender with proper money to be made and proper middle-aged incomes to be tapped. The big brands have arrived, and are putting on a show. As you walk in there’s a fenced-off area with a cycle track. It’s been done up as a kind of fantasy landscape, with a few plastic trees, a tiny little MTB area and a circuit with a lot of corners.
At present, various bikes are being test-ridden. For a second, if you squint very hard, it almost looks like Amsterdam. The number of people flogging different sorts of cycle-related clothing has increased enormously; lots and lots of tasteful jackets, half a mile of black and white merino-base layers, a lot of labels involving the word ‘wicking’. There are coloured wheels and kit for triathlons. There are bullhorn bars, fancy bidons, courier bags and enough hi-visibility gear to start a building site. There are a couple of places selling assorted bits of bicycle knick-knackery (bar ends, novelty saddles) which, no matter the angle you examine them from, still somehow manage to look like sex toys. There are jackets and helmets, socks and trouser clips, bibs and shorts. There is a very great deal of Lycra. Above all, there is an atmosphere of purpose, a sense that here among the children of the new cycling revolution there are vital things to be done and said and bought, a feeling that critical mass either has been reached or is very close to being reached. None of these cyclists (except perhaps the women) looks marginal any more.
By the Condor stand, where the bikes have been placed in alcoves and spotlit like exhibits in a gallery, the men stand in worship, hands behind their backs and weight on one hip. Beside the most attractive bikes, a little crowd forms. Someone strokes a crossbar, someone else gives a tyre a friendly pinch. The lights give the paint on the frames an impression of infinite depth and sparkle so the green is as green as the Emerald City. The saddles are black or retro leather, and so spare in shape they look like medieval arrowheads. In the eyes of the men are such expressions of longing that the discreet price tags beside the bikes begin to seem less like statements of fact than taunts. With that, the eyes say, you could go as fast as carbon fibre, you could go as fast as a car – maybe you could even go as fast as Armstrong. With that, you could ride right off the edge of the city and into the sky. Some of them tap the tyres one more time and then move on, regretful. Others just stay, wandering in circles round and round the different bikes, gazing.
It is only when you get outside the Exhibition Centre that you come down to earth. This is London. Here on the streets of Earl’s Court there is no brave new world where the bicycle reigns supreme, and no matter how hard you squint it never looks like Amsterdam. There are certainly a few cyclists moving to and fro, but they are dwarfed by the numbers of cars, buses, motorbikes and vans. There are HGVs with busted mirrors and mothers driving battered Polos distracted by squabbling children in the back. There are van drivers with lunchtime sandwiches smearing their dashboards and couples in estate cars arguing about parking. There are dispatch riders on motorbikes overtaking bendy buses and skinny blonde women driving obese black SUVs. There are black cabs and delivery lorries, a Civic-full of ladies, minicabs and Transits. It’s the usual London streetscape, the same mixture of bricks, wind and barely suppressed impatience as probably existed a couple of hundred years ago. The cyclists who are here only slip in and out of an existing scene. In this particular area, there are no cycle lanes (unless a desultory sketch of a figure of eight in the gutter can be called a cycle lane) and no special pleading. There’s nothing here that acknowledges the bicycle or even the motorbike. If you want to cycle, then you have to do so on four-wheeled terms. The same picture extends out past the SW postcodes, through the centre, the north and the west, out past the river to the suburban hinterlands. If you try cycling in Bristol or Birmingham, Manchester or Glasgow, the geography might vary significantly but the logistics don’t. Bristol and York both pride themselves on providing for cyclists. Cambridge and Oxford have been getting students and tutors to and from lectures by bicycle for decades. Lincoln and Ipswich both look as if they were rolled out on the flatlands with nothing but cyclists in mind. But, in practice, cyclists still play second fiddle to cars in every city in Britain.
But there are perks to being the transport system’s perpetual underdog. For a start, it means that officialdom’s efforts are concentrated elsewhere, so planners and people with parking tickets generally leave you alone. It also means that cyclists tend to find routes away from the main arterial roads, and thus end up with their own private transport network. Cycle through Bloomsbury, or along the many hidden canal towpaths which still join England’s cities together, or near Richmond Park, and you’ll find yourself joining if not quite a movement of population on a Chinese scale, then something astonishing. There are bicycle traffic jams by Tottenham Court Road and bicycle gridlocks on Parkway. In winter, you could sit near the major cycle lanes and watch more flashing lights pass by than in the sky near Heathrow.
And because cycling is currently set up to favour the rebellious and the broke, it means that cyclists can never be homogenised into a single grey entity. One of the lovely things about riding round a city – any city – is watching other cyclists and savouring their strangeness. There is not and never has been one single urban type, and there never really could be. The figures are rising – between 2001 and 2008, the numbers of people in the UK who cycle regularly rose from 2.3 million to 3.2 million and the numbers of cyclists in London doubled – but all that rise seems to have done is to increase the diversity. Wait near a frequently used route and watch the cyclists streaming past during the morning and evening rush hours. After a bit the scene begins to appear like the Eastern Bloc countries after the fall of the Berlin Wall; many different groups jostling for dominance, a total restructuring of social politics, lawlessness, occasional outbreaks of violence, lots of exceptionally bad clothing. For every rider blazing with gadgetry, there’s another on a bike which looks as if it was cobbled together out of old chair legs and office stationery. There are packs of Ridgebacks all racing each other to the junction, there are old ladies on things which look like two-wheeled shopping trolleys, there are men in suits and pillocks on Bianchis. There are government-issue cyclists who are either very afraid of breaking the law or very afraid of being caught on camera while breaking the law, and there are those for whom the law is an entirely optional concept. There are those who ride like they belong on a bike and there are those who ride like they’d rather be in an armoured vehicle. There are those who have helmets, those who don’t, and those who sport different headgear entirely – woolly bonnets, Santa hats, things with built-in headphones. There are businessmen on space-age racers going at the same pace as girls on silver single-speeds. There are those for whom The Look evidently matters more than either The Bike or The Ability to Ride That Bike. There are people who look like they know what they’re doing, and those who are obviously bluffing. There are guys on low-riders, slung out half reclining like Dennis Hopper on a Harley, and those who have evidently forgone the stern mistress of style for the stairlift of practicality. There are those who cycle in skirts, there are those who cycle in overcoats, there are those who wouldn’t dream of cycling in anything other than six-inch red stilettos. There are fluorescent commuters on their spanking new hybrids and lardy boys twiddling along on folding bikes like elephants on beach balls. There are tourists on Boris Bikes and lots of kids of seventeen trying to get home on a BMX without being seen by anyone who knows them, and there are ladies who are Doing Their Bit for the environment. There are those who cycle with a child at either end, and there are those who prefer to load the bike like they do in Cambodia. Just like London itself, everyone is represented; every age, every class, every race and religion.
Cycling here is not like cycling in either the Netherlands or India. It does not rely, as in Holland, on the knowledge that the cyclist has a legal and moral right to be there, or, as in India, on the assumption that by getting on a bicycle the cyclist has proved himself so existentially inferior that he has no rights at all. It relies instead on the principle that you must fight your own corner. Once on a bike, you realise very quickly that everyone else on the road is cleaving to an irrefutable truth: that whatever form of transport you happen to be using at that moment – car, bus, own two feet – is the only possible right one, and all other forms should cede to it instantly. You must therefore make it clear to all other road users that you too would like to arrive at your destination safely and promptly, even if you have to dance on the grave of every rule in the Highway Code to do so. Still, after only a few short weeks, it doesn’t even occur to you that the experience you have just had and the way you have therefore learned to cycle is the exception, not the rule. If you were to behave like you do here in Berlin or Amsterdam or Shanghai, you would be regarded – and rightly so – as a complete idiot. For better or worse, you have joined the ranks of Britain’s feral cyclists.
Which leads on to another interesting discovery. What really bothers many cyclists is not other vehicles, but other cyclists. General traffic begins to fade from main event to mere backdrop. You realise that you have a much more pressing issue to deal with in dropping the guy on the white single-speed and making sure he stays dropped. Or riding down the man who just overtook you on a vastly inferior piece of kit. Or – most satisfactory, this – knowing the city better than the person you’re racing, taking a nifty shortcut and emerging a few hundred yards ahead of them at a crucial stage in the game. If you get five cyclists lined up in front of the lights, they may not acknowledge each other’s existence, they may never make eye contact with anything other than the pavement, but there’s a reasonable bet that four out of them will be working out how to annihilate the fifth. And if you can arrive at work having maintained the purity of your trajectory and having been overtaken by nothing but cars, then it will cheer you up for the whole day.
There were many reasons behind cycling’s miraculous resurrection – the introduction of the Congestion Charge in London, a succession of scares about rising fuel costs, terrorism. On the day of the July bombings in 2005, the Evans Cycle franchise announced that they’d sold over four times as many bikes as usual. Some were sold because, with half the city’s transport links in ribbons, there was no other way of getting home, and some because what had happened that day had frightened many people so badly they were never going to go back underground. But beyond the bombings or the Congestion Charge there was something else – a more profound swell of enthusiasm for bicycles and their benefits. Government policy had nothing to do with it; for the past ten years, local and national initiatives on cycling have trailed well behind the deeper trends.
Unfortunately, as politicians are now beginning to realise, by marginalising cycling for decades they have managed to turn a bunch of mild and herbivorous middle-class individuals into a bunch of fit, trained and highly assertive lawbreakers. Since cyclists were faced with a landscape which either took no interest in them or appeared keen on actively eliminating them, they had to work out how to stay safe. The solution for many was to develop a style of cycling based on a combination of mountain biking, road racing and BMX skills with a dash of gymnastics thrown in for good measure. Proper observation of the rules of the road had absolutely nothing to do with it; the law ignored them, so they would ignore the law. Or, rather, every time they got on a bike, they made the law anew on a case-by-case basis. It wasn’t like being a driver where you had to pass a test and where the way you behaved was strictly regulated by the nature of roads and other road users. If you were a cyclist, you could make a decision every time you got into the saddle about whether to cycle furiously or easily, about whether this trip was going to be about taking on the fixie at the roundabout or restricting your sense of competition to giving three taxis the finger. Some might stop at one red light because it’s a crossroads, but they almost certainly won’t stop at the next and definitely not when they’re racing someone else. They would never ride on the pavement except when it would be ridiculous not to. Some days, they’ll ride straight over pedestrian crossings, other days they won’t. Plainly, explaining to the courts that today you broke the law because you felt like it but yesterday you didn’t break it because you couldn’t be bothered is not a realistic defence. But it does make you feel a lot more alive.
There is, of course, a more sinister flip side to all this. Alison Parker is a partner at Hodge Jones Allen, a London law firm specialising in personal injury. She exudes reassurance and competence, and has the kind of unforced gravitas that comes from doing and knowing your chosen subject very well for a long time. A sizeable proportion of her clients are cyclists. ‘You cycle yourself, presumably?’ Yes, I say. ‘Well, I absolutely don’t, and I wouldn’t cycle in London – I consider it to be completely suicidal. I wouldn’t do it, I just wouldn’t do it. Probably because I see too many incidents. The problem is that when a cyclist comes into contact with a very large vehicle, they are absolutely bound to come off worse.’
We meet at a restaurant near her firm, and on one of the paper table mats Parker sketches out the four classic accidents to befall urban cyclists. First is the cyclist coming down on the inside of heavy traffic. The lane of waiting traffic parts to allow a car to turn right, the car goes straight into the cyclist. Second is on a roundabout: the cyclist sticks to the outside while the car takes the inner route but then pulls across the path of the cyclist when they reach their exit. (‘Go round on the inside and indicate outwards. Or get off and walk round the roundabout – that’s my advice.’) Third is people opening car doors directly into the path of a cyclist – either the passenger door in stationary traffic, or the driver’s door in a line of parked cars. Fourth, and most notorious, is the HGV making a left-hand turn. There’s a cyclist on the inside by the curb, the HGV swings out to the right, the cyclist rides into the gap and is then crushed by the HGV as it turns to the left. Of the thirteen cyclist fatalities in London during 2009, nine were killed in this way by HGVs. Sight lines on HGVs are notoriously poor – a cyclist or a pedestrian has to be several yards in front of the cab before they become visible – and the drivers are simply unaware that there’s a cyclist anywhere close. ‘The advice is NEVER to go into that gap. It’s safer just to hang back.’ Eight of the nine HGV fatalities during 2008 were women. As cyclists, women are more cautious and law-abiding than men, and more prone to tuck themselves into corners at junctions where drivers can’t see them.
The combination of physical risk and environmental smugness is a potent one, and when they first take up cycling many commuters go through a phase of almost radioactive self-righteousness. After all, if you feel you own the moral high ground and you’re doing something a little bit scary at the same time, then you might well reach the mystical god-like state called Always Being in the Right. Big mistake. After a couple of years, the best urban cyclists mellow, realise they didn’t personally invent cycling and get on with reaching their destination. The bad ones just keep arguing until someone breaks their jaw. ‘As a pedestrian in London,’ says Parker, laughing, ‘I really hate cyclists! They never bloody well stop at zebra crossings, and I’m more likely to be road-raged as a pedestrian than I ever am when I’m behind the wheel of a car. There are some very arrogant and cavalier cyclists in London who would happily mow you down. I think cyclists, particularly in cities, do have a mindset that everyone’s against them.’ After all that, it almost comes as a relief to hear Parker has an even riskier group of clients than cyclists. ‘I’ve always thought that motorcycling is a bit like smoking – if someone had realised when they were invented how incredibly dangerous they are, they would never have been allowed, a bit like cigarettes. It’s too late now. You’re on two wheels, you’ve got no stability, no protection at all round your body, and you’re sitting on 1,000cc of engine, and doing 80mph – I mean, how dangerous is that? I just find it mind-boggling every time I think about it. Stay on four wheels, or on two wheels where you’re travelling at a speed where you’re much more in control of what happens if you come off.’
Muratori’s Café is at the junction of Farringdon Road and Margery Street opposite the Royal Mail’s Mount Pleasant sorting office. It’s an old-style kind of café – a London greasy spoon with warmth and Formica but without the reek of grease. There’s wood panelling on the walls and tabloids on the benches, and once in a while someone emerges from the kitchen with a comment or a joke to refill each cup with tea. Outside the huge corner windows, the view is of rain and wet cyclists. Muratori’s has been a cabbie’s refuge for years, and this particular afternoon – slimy, cold, early Feb – the place is half full.
The following lively exchange of views is interesting not because it’s unexpected, but because, for an hour or so, it’s salutary to imagine what it must feel like to be a cabbie driving in circles round London’s endless frustrations. Cabbies have always felt an enormous sense of ownership about any city they work in. They’re part of the place; London would not be the city it is without them. And since they feel they belong to these streets, then one of two things happens. Either they’re completely secure in that knowledge and very laid-back about everything, or they’re monumentally pissed off at all the things on the road that they feel don’t have as much right to be there as they do.
BB: So have you ever cut up a cyclist?
Les (taxi no. 30839): No!
Unanimous shouting from everyone round the table: No! No, no, no!
Les: Seriously! Because the last thing I want is a cyclist bashing my cab.
Keith (taxi no. 30729): Because we know we’re on a loser. Even if you do nothing wrong, you’re on a loser.
BB: That isn’t most people’s experience. Most people have been cut up by a cab at some point.
Mickey (taxi no. 54316): Yeah, OK, but let’s say that happens, come up and talk to me, don’t bang on the wing mirror and when I get out, cycle off. I’ve seen a cab and when the guy got out, the cyclist rode round and round tormenting him because he knew any time the guy got near him he could just cycle off.
Keith: They’re so aggressive, aren’t they? They bang your bonnet, bang your wing mirror and then they cycle off, they won’t stay around to argue. That’s what really pisses me off.
BB: Do you think all cyclists are the same?
Keith: Yeah. You can generalise with cyclists.
BB: So you don’t discriminate between people who are cycling for work, couriers, and other cyclists?
Keith: They’re all the same.
Les: You do meet the odd one with the lights on and the yellow stuff all over and the backpacks and everything, and they generally stick to the rules. But the ones who are riding around with next to nothing on, just a bit of Lycra, zooming about delivering stuff, they will take the mickey, no doubt about it. I don’t go out of my way to get in their way, but I just find it’s hard to avoid them sometimes.
BB: They’re just doing a job, same as you.
Les: I understand that, but if they come up the side as they do, if you look at any of our cabs, there’ll be little scrape marks along the paintwork. Now, if I go in the garage for that, they’ll go, £50 mate. I’m not going to get that back off them, never in a million years. And that happens every day.
Paul (didn’t give his driver number): You know what it all boils down to? There’s no punishment. They don’t think the law applies to them.
Steve (over at table in corner): There’s a place where all the paramedics go, the guys who deal with all the bad accidents and things, and their entertainment when they’re sitting waiting for a call is watching the traffic lights to see how many cyclists stop. They say they actually take a tally. Nine out of ten don’t bother.
Les: I don’t understand why they’ve always got to push to the front.
BB: Because if you don’t, you’re invisible and you’re stuck behind some trucker’s exhaust.
Les: Yes, but I still don’t think, well, I’ve got to commit suicide, push myself in front of a lorry, just because I’m breathing a bit of crap. I’d sit a few yards back.
Keith: There should be some sort of registration for them.
I know it’s difficult and it should be free at first, but they should be registered. Because every cyclist, that’s one less car on the road, and that’s great. But you still can’t have them all banging and breaking things.
Mickey: If they knock off your wing mirror, scratch the side of the cab, smash your back light, there’s nothing you can do. There’s no comeback. They just ride off. There’s no way of recognising them again. The old cabs used to have a diesel cap on the back. Many times, they just hold onto that and get dragged along by a cab rather than cycle.
Les (reflectively): There’s a lot of anger, isn’t there? A lot of anger coming out of people. See, most cab drivers know we’re not going to get anywhere quickly. So we don’t drive fast. We know – I’ve had twenty-nine years’ experience of knowing I’m not going to get anywhere. We’ll get there eventually, but there’s no point in rushing.
BB: But the point is, you can get somewhere quick on a bike.
Keith: See, that’s the trouble. That’s their mindset – I can get past that, I can go faster, I can get across town. But they’ve still got to realise they’ve got to stop at a red light.
BB: If every cyclist suddenly stopped at every red light, would you start respecting them?
Les: Well, I don’t know …
Keith: Get ’em off the roads. Cycle lanes, whatever, just get ’em off the roads.
Les: License them.
Mickey: Round ’em all up and nuke ’em! (general hilarity).
Paul (looking out of the window at a couple of cyclists coming across the junction towards the café): Hang on, watch that – watch that! He’s coming up to the red and … (the cyclist stops). Well, he’s done it safely, but nine times out of ten they don’t. Look! Look! Guy’s just gone straight through. He’s gone through a red light. Look! He’s overtaking! BB: He’s allowed to overtake!
Keith: Yes, and he’s wearing a dirty jumper. And that ain’t right (gales of laughter). We don’t like cyclists, do we? We hate ’em.
Mickey: Last summer, June or July it was, there was a naked cycle ride. I was amazed, I was sitting there and there must have been a thousand of them.
BB: So if all cyclists cycled naked, would it make you like them better?
Keith: Yes. Definitely. They shouldn’t be allowed to cycle unless they’re naked.
After an hour or so I put away my Dictaphone and get up.
Keith: There you go, then. Sorry about that. Tell you what, though, we hate bus drivers more. Bendy buses. Oh, we really dislike them. So you’re not top of the list. And motorbikes. They’re third.
In fact, this turns out not to be a comprehensive list. The next time I took a cab, I asked the driver what he thought of other road users. In addition to cyclists, motorbikes and bus drivers, he added Post Office vans, dustbin lorries and anyone driving a Mercedes.
On a cold clear day in mid-November, Patrick Field is spreading the gospel at Speakers’ Corner. Field is in his late fifties, bundled up in a couple of well-worn jackets and a fleece hat – no helmet, no hi-vis, and what looks like a home-built bike with a plain blue lugged frame, drop bars and CDs slotted between the spokes. The only obvious concessions to safety are a very powerful front light and his red jacket. Clearly, here is a man who knows his stuff. Field has been cycling and thinking about cycling for a very long time. In addition to running the London School of Cycling, he’s known as something of a two-wheel guru, writing articles, appearing at conferences and teaching the rules of good behaviour to everyone from complete beginners to experienced racers. He knows the city very well, and he has a lot of strong opinions about it. The feelings are obviously reciprocated. At some stage London has imprinted itself on him so completely that, if you look carefully, you can probably find the route from Kingston to Stratford mapped through the lines on his face.
Anyway, for today the plan is to find out about how to cycle. Not how to cycle with government approval, or how to cycle by trial and error, but how to cycle realistically. After Field has given my bike a quick check, we set off along Upper Brook Street to practise positioning. Field echoes Alison Parker: what, he asks, is the most common type of accident for cyclists? Parked cars – hitting the open door of a parked vehicle. To avoid doing so, ‘Your default position should be the middle of the leftmost lane of traffic.’ The important thing is to take a nice smooth line. If you know you’re just about to have to swing out back into the road to avoid a line of parked cars, the best thing is not to tuck yourself too far into the kerb to start with, to look behind you to see what’s coming and to make it plain either by indicating or by your trajectory what your intentions are. But here we run into another familiar issue – the way men and women behave on bikes. ‘Girls tend towards, “I’m not really here, don’t worry about me, I don’t want to be a nuisance.” That’s dreadfully dangerous because these drivers have all got busy lives and they’re distracted and they haven’t had enough rest, and if you’re doing your, “Oh, don’t worry about me” act, then you can’t be surprised if they don’t notice you at all. The other side of the coin is what we can call the male problem, and that’s, “Well, fuck you, I’m going to ride my bike.” It’s like making an enemy out of everyone else on the road. And I think that’s quite English, in a way – no one’s ever told these poor boys that they can be powerful without being furious. No one’s ever encouraged them to be a powerful friendly cheerful adult – “Yes, I do own the road, let’s share it.”’
The best thing to do is to learn to take what’s yours – the full six feet, the car-sized space on the road. You cycle at least a metre out from any parked cars, but you don’t tuck too far back in when the cars disappear. And once you start realising that you need exactly the right amount of road – not too much and not too little – then in all probability you’ll stop being scared as well. ‘The truth is that you’re not as desperate as everybody else, because you’re on a bike and if you need to hurry, you can. You can actually be generous and kind and friendly and helpful. But underneath, you can only be generous with this commodity because you’ve owned it – “This is my space, and I’m happy to be generous with it.” But if you’re only letting other people take from you, then you’re in trouble. So at the beginning, I try and encourage people to be more tough-minded than you need to be later on. You can relax into a smaller place when it’s appropriate because you know that when you need a big space you can take it right back. And, anyway, why would you want to pick a fight with someone who’s fifty times more powerful than you?’
Part of the trick, Field says, is to be visible. Many rookie urban cyclists assume that the best way to be seen is to festoon themselves with lights and colours in the hope that if they dress in head-to-toe electric yellow, the traffic will be dazzled enough to get out of the way. Unfortunately, if everyone who cycles wears the same thing, then everyone looks anonymous, and as soon as they start being anonymous they become invisible. True visibility has very little to do with wearing fluorescent vests and everything to do with the way in which you cycle. You could be lit like the Post Office Tower but if you cycle in the gutter, then no one’s going to see you. ‘What people take notice of is what attracts their attention. So your job is not to be a plastic cone, your job is to be a person. And if the hi-vis jacket helps you to be a person, that’s beautiful. But the jacket on its own doesn’t make you noticeable. What people see is your personality. So whatever helps you to express your personality is going to help.’ The most conspicuous cyclists I can think of, I say, do not own any item of cycling paraphernalia at all. Field nods. ‘If I’m driving my truck and I come up behind you and go’ – he gives my bike an ostentatious once over – ‘“That’s interesting, why a basket on the back, oh yes, leather boots, that’s an interesting idea”, or I come up behind you and go, “Get out the fucking way, you should be on the pavement”, that’s really up to me. But in both cases, you’re safe because I’m thinking about you. And, of course, there are wonderful pragmatic and humanitarian reasons to want to be popular, but if you have to choose between being popular and being safe …’
Field’s favourite role models are ‘Knightsbridge matrons. I think they’re becoming extinct because the Russians have priced them out of Mayfair and Belgravia. They don’t have to be good at riding a bike, they’re just good at being themselves. And you see them coming, and they’re not nasty about it – they probably would be in a shipwreck, but that’s another story – they’re just, “Hello! Thank you!”’ First rule, says Field, is to be able to ride a bike to a minimum standard. Next is to understand the rules of traffic, which, he says, were devised to be simple, ‘because stupid people need to be able to understand them’. Traffic is formal, and it works on the principle that no one wants to crash because crashing is painful and expensive. And ‘because they’re nice people like us and well socialised and with responsibilities and families and all kinds of stuff, but even the gangsters, even the idiots whose parents didn’t love them enough, they don’t want to run over random people. They might want to run over their enemies, but they don’t want to run over you or me. So if you give them a chance not to run you over, they won’t.’
We keep going, down Rotten Row, over South Carriage Drive and into Knightsbridge, cycling at a reasonable pace to keep warm, moving from busy main roads down quieter side streets. When we get to a convenient place to pull over, Field gives me a few more tips on safety. How you treat a red light, he says, depends on how you’re feeling about both yourself and the rest of society. ‘I tend to always stop at red lights. And the reason I like doing it is because I can show off that I can still have my feet on the pedals and my arms folded, and I’m a very vain old man, but I like doing it because I know I don’t have to. It’s like an ostentatious show – you know, I’m making a social contract with you people, I’ll follow these stupid rules, but if I do run a red light, I have to be in a hurry. The ones who make me laugh are … you know, I’m waiting at a red light, and these kids go past, desperate to move, as if their bike will explode if they stop. And then thirty seconds later, fat granddad overtakes them and I’m not even breathing heavy. The people who can’t stop at red lights aren’t happy – they don’t have the psychological resources to be themselves, so they’re infected with this anxiety, this, “I’ve got to get going.” I’m not saying I’ve stopped at every red light even today, but it’s my default, to stop.’
But, I say, there may be too many cyclists out there who have now learned to love cycling in a place where reds are considered optional. The rest of the world would still like us to stop. If possible, for good. Field is dismissive. Why try and fit into a system if that system is already faulty? ‘There’s an authoritarian optimism – if we’re really obedient, then everyone will treat us well. But when Tesco wanted to smash the Sunday trading laws, what did they do? They opened on Sundays. They challenged the law. If you want to get rid of the law, you break it. So obedience doesn’t make people respect you. That’s just stupid.’ As for the howls of protest from motorists, he reckons they’re just looking for an excuse to be angry. ‘What pisses motorists off is that they’re pissed off already. I’ve had a bus driver blowing his horn at me because he wanted me to go through a red light so he could go through a red light. The idea that, oh, I would respect cyclists if they stopped at red lights – people who say that don’t respect cyclists. And they’re looking for an excuse not to.’
He instructs me on taking a circuit of Sloane Square. It’s all stuff I’ve done before but not thought about in a systematic way – enforcing my priority, looking over my left shoulder to make sure no other two-wheelers are taking the corridor between the parked cars and me, riding like I had a right to be there. The important thing with cycling in the city, he says, is to be generous. Riding a bike is ‘about negotiating conflict, it’s about understanding what other people want, making sure they know what you want and resolving any problems that arise from that. And your abilities are your ability to be small or to be big, your ability to change your shape – these are all like stereotypically female characteristics.’ He has a technique for dealing with aggression. It’s an original one, but it makes sense. ‘Go through the traffic spreading love. In a way that’s much crueller to the idiots as well – if they come up to you going, “beep beep blah blah”, and you start swearing at them, very quickly it’s all getting a bit out of control and unstable. But also you’re giving them exactly what they wanted – to export a bit of their disappointment about the way their life turned out. Whereas if you go, “Are you having a bad day?” (in a caring voice) and you just pitch it at exactly the right point where they can’t tell whether you’re being sympathetic or taking the piss so they don’t know how to respond, you actually give them a chance to grow. Which is a bonus.’ He smiles.
‘It’s so nice,’ he says reflectively, ‘to have something that’s completely under your control. You know, if bin Laden is blowing up the Blackwall Tunnel as we speak and there’s going to be a traffic jam from London to Birmingham, it’s not really going to be a big problem for us. We can carry on.’ With that, he presents me with my Dictaphone. ‘It says on the screen here, oh, for God’s sake, shut up, you boring old bastard.’ I cycle northwards, wondering if I should have a flashing front light. After a bit, I stop wondering. It goes on flashing. Like the city it belongs to, Field’s version of cycling is a pungent mixture of pragmatism, tolerance, experience and moral politics. If you start cycling in most British cities, experienced cyclists will often tell you to think and behave completely defensively. Field doesn’t do that. Defence plays a part, but so do openness and a sense of being permitted to take up exactly as much room in this world as you need. It’s a novel concept. Or, rather, it seems a novel concept on the streets of London. But in other parts of the world, there are places which are much better than this – and much, much worse.
