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Chapter Four

The Great Wheel

At some point during your early education you learn the world’s countries. Africa is hot, Antarctica is cold, America is powerful and the Falklands are ours. And the Netherlands are flat. There may be other details – canals, dope, clogs, tulips – but the one overriding reality is that in all of its 16,000 square miles it doesn’t have two lumps to rub together. Even so, it’s only when you actually arrive in the Netherlands that those old facts come alive. Looking out of the train window at the countryside – fields of potatoes, barns, cows – you finally grasp what ‘flat’ actually means. Flat means not a hummock, not a summit. Flat means a country of angles and rules, a place where a road or a canal could, if it so wished, go right over the horizon and straight on till morning. Flat means there are no fast or slow bits, no freewheeling, no challenging a gradient. Flat means that you don’t need gears. At all. Ever. Flat means that in order to climb anything more than stairs, you have to leave the country. For anyone used to a countryful of curves, flat is really, astonishingly, completely flat.

Of course, the Netherlands are flat because the ocean is flat, and in this part of the world earth replicates water. This is a borrowed land, a surface taken field by field from out of the sea, a place that only exists at all as a great collective act of faith. ‘God made the world,’ as the saying goes, ‘but the Dutch made the Netherlands.’ Almost a third of the country is below sea level, protected by a system of dikes and embankments. Half of it wouldn’t appear on a map at all if the Dutch hadn’t spent several millennia putting it there. That they did so – and that two-thirds of the population still lives, so to speak, underwater – is testimony to the Dutch love of heavy engineering.

Spending time in the Netherlands feels remarkably similar to how things must have felt in Britain during the heyday of the Victorians. There’s the same sense of flexibility to things, the sense of great practicality married to infinite possibility. After all, if you have a country with no hills and almost no natural features, then you can start from scratch. You can have towns and cities, heaths and dams. You can build bridges, embankments, locks and level crossings. You can slap down an airport runway absolutely wherever you like. You can have fields the size of six football pitches and motorways without bends. You can have enormous wide roads covered in clever asphalt which makes less noise than the ordinary stuff. You can plough your fields with water, or you can make them harvest wind. You can have forests, and then you can chop down all your forests. And then, having noticed belatedly that everything looks weird and that you have no windbreaks, shade, oxygen or building materials, you can grow your forests back. When threatened, you can make your country an island, or drown out your enemies. You can have cycle lanes larger and better maintained than the average British B-road. You can have kids believing that a race down the slope of a subway underpass proves their prowess as a grimpeur. You can walk down the street one week and find it gone when you come to walk back. You can live in a mythical place where things – houses, shops, motorways – appear one week and vanish the next. The Netherlands may be notoriously stable and prosperous, but it also has to be the most changeable place in Europe.

And, in a country without summits, there can be absolutely no possible reason not to cycle. In fact, the only puzzle is why it took someone (or several people) so many centuries to get around to inventing the bicycle, given that this reclaimed landscape appears to have been designed specifically with two wheels in mind. But, strangely enough, the Dutch did not take to the bicycle immediately. In common with the rest of Europe, the middle classes caught the velocipede craze sometime back in the 1870s. For a while, it became fashionable to be seen making journeys into the countryside on the new contraptions. Unfortunately, in many rural areas, a lot of people who saw them didn’t like them. Velocipedists found themselves under attack, targeted by locals who lay in wait and hurled stones or coal at them. Certain areas became notorious for attacks. Round Delft, where cyclists were blamed for putting the cows off their milk and making the horses run wild, they were forced to band together and ride in groups in order to pass safely.

Despite such deterrents, the Dutch cycle industry grew rapidly from the 1890s onwards. Since by then it was the British who had the strongest and best-developed market in bike design, Dutch framemakers either copied them or imported from England. In 1895, 85 percent of all bikes bought in the Netherlands were from Britain; the vestiges of that influence can still be seen in the solid, gentlemanly shape of a traditional Dutch bike even now. Demand eventually became so strong that British manufacturers couldn’t cope, and an increasing number of local framemakers stepped in to fill the gap.

By the turn of the century, the bicycle was the dominant mode of transport for most of the country. A network of cycle paths was established and the major cities began to incorporate bicycles into their traffic plans. The home-grown industry began to develop; in tandem with the independent framemakers – who, as in the UK, were often blacksmiths or metalworkers by training and therefore had both the skills and the materials to hand – big brands like Gazelle and Batavus started to emerge, churning out large numbers of good-quality bikes for a growing market. To the Dutch, cycling just made sense. It suited the size of the country and the fact that so much of it was urban. Bicycles became cheap and ubiquitous enough that almost every member of a family could have one, parents using them to commute or to fetch provisions, children to get to and from school. Since they didn’t need elaborate gears, there were very few parts to get rusty, and since they didn’t need to climb, they could sit down solid on the road. They could be left out in the rain for days without rusting and, since all bikes had dress guards, there was no chance of getting one’s clothing messed up in the spokes. Almost all were designed to be ridden fully laden.