The Bicycle Book

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.

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.