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