On Easter weekend I went for my longest ride in a while. The day was sunny, still, and not too warm — perfect cycling weather. The bank holiday stretched ahead and I headed roughly west with no particular agenda from Harringay to the West End, through the Royal Parks, over Albert Bridge and on to Battersea and Putney, looping back over Hammersmith Bridge.
I’ve tried to cycle as much as possible during lockdown. For ten hours a day I shuffle around the small perimeter of my rented house, longing to get on my bike and suddenly be 10 miles away. With public transport prohibited and police drones tracking the “unnecessary” movement of cars, the bicycle has become the only way to move beyond the confines of our new hyperlocal lives.
This strange situation made me think about the history of the bike as a liberatory machine.
In the early 20th century, bikes were mass-produced in Europe’s industrial cities. They were cheaper than horses or trains, and they allowed working class people to move freely more than a few miles outside their home.
The relationship between human beings and space-time was dramatically reconfigured, particularly in isolated areas. Towns and villages that had once seemed like a foreign country could now be reached in a couple of hours.
In the months before my Gran died she loved to talk about cycling. She grew up in rural Connemara in the West of Ireland and saved up her wages for months to buy her first bike in the 1940s, which meant she could sneak out at night and cycle to a dance in one of the nearby towns. This journey would have taken four or five hours on foot, but on a bike she made it in just over 60 minutes. A couple of decades earlier, the bicycle had been an invaluable tool in guerrilla warfare against the British in the War of Independence.
Bicycles also gave women greater independence. As one 19th cyclist wrote: “The bicycle is in truth the women’s emancipator. It imparts an open-air freedom and freshness to a life hithertofore cribbed, cabined and confined by convention.” She describes her political experience of freedom with a spatial metaphor- no longer ‘confined’, able to breeze through the ‘open-air’.
As Micha Frazer-Caroll describes powerfully in this piece, many Londoners’ homes aren’t designed to be stayed in for long periods of time. They’re cramped and old and allow our landlords extract maximum profit from the minimum amount of space.
They’re a necessary gateway to our communal lives outside, which we can no longer access. But with a bike, you have a magic ticket to the city again.
The roads are quiet at the moment, probably only slightly busier than they were in cycling’s 20th century heyday. I’m easily smashing my records on Strava segments. As I skirt the Outer Circle of Regent’s Park I see the entire spectrum of cyclists: whole families with kids wobbling in front, lycra-clad club riders, housemates chatting on knackered old hybrids. We confidently spread out across the road.
It’s a lovely glimpse of what cities might be like with fewer cars. Across the world local governments are making more space for cyclists and walkers. These measures — like housing the homeless or meeting unemployed people’s basic needs — are supposed to be temporary. But they might prove hard to undo.
