22 August 2010

Railing again: Bike parking at Tate Modern


Tate Modern used to have a perfectly good bike shed to park in, which everyone ignored because the railings outside the entrance were more convenient.

Now, the bike shed has disappeared as part of the development works to the south of the main building. So the railings are now the only place you can park your bike anyway, legitimised by a sign.

Which is fine, but slapped wrists to Tate for removing the bike section from their how-to-get-here web page. They used to be cited by the LCC (still are, actually) as a good example of an attraction whose website encourages you to cycle there.

Not any longer. There's info on getting there by boat, tube, bus, taxi, car, coach, camel - OK, I was lying about the camel. But nothing about bikes, not even hire bikes. (There are three fairly convenient docking stations, which surely ought to be pointed out on their website. What do they think those lines of identical bikes are? An installation?)

Talking of which, Marcel Duchamp was a keen cyclist, of course, as we know from his Bicycle Wheel of 1913. It was originally going to be an entire bike, but he left it fastened by only one D-lock to a rack in Waterloo.

Update: The Tate Modern website has now been updated (though only with info about hire bikes). Maybe they've been reading this blog.

2 comments:

  1. Tate have updated their website and now have a By bike bit. Only mentions the hire bikes though.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Hooray! Ta for info! Have added update to blog post.

    ReplyDelete