Plus ça change: Bikes through the ages at Rapha

Even if you're a real cyclist who considers the Tour de France a good ride spoiled, we recommend nipping into the Rapha cafe, the über-stylish racers' pop-up in Clerkenwell that we've blogged about before, this week.

While the Tour is on - this week, then - they have a fabulous exhibition downstairs of racing bikes for every decade through the 20th century. (It's actually in celebration of the 'centenary of the Col du Tourmalet', an age geologists might dispute.)

The remarkable thing is, of course, how little bikes have changed since 1900. The single front brake on the century-old model is pretty rudimentary, but otherwise with a respray it could be a trendy single-speed next to you in today's ASL, Brooks saddle and all.


As the decades roll on, gearing technology develops from alarmingly crude levers on the rear seatstays, but otherwise the most noticeable change is the choking algal growth of sponsors' logos.

And the handlebars of this bike - from the 1910s - show the cutting-edge technology used by the club racer of the post-Edwardian years.

On my hobby horse again

Our North of England correspondents have drawn our attention to Alnwick Castle's display of ancient bicycles. On a trip there recently, they saw this fine hobby horse from the 1820s.

An information panel by it explains that this model belonged to the Duke. Built by a London maker called Denis Johnson, this particular hobby horse was more sophisticated than the 'draisiennes' popular on the Continent: it had steering, which must have seemed edgy and controversial at the time.

Thanks to Si and Sue.

Bridge partners: Little and Large

On 3 October, the world’s longest pedestrian-and-cyclists-only bridge (as it’s claimed) will open sixty or so miles north from New York City. The Poughkeepsie Highland Railroad Bridge (right) is a century-old goods-train line that crosses the Hudson River. It closed in the 1970s, but has been restored with privately raised money. The 2km-long crossing will join up cycle trails on either side, and promises one of the world’s most adrenalin-making pedalled experiences. Especially when you get halfway across 65m above the water and realise how rusty it looks.

Not as good as the Humber Bridge, which I’m always banging on about, obviously. But still one to add to my ‘future projects’ folder, perhaps in conjunction with a ride along NYC’s Manhattan Greenway as part of an ambitious US-based cycle trip. One which I’ll never do and will end up going to Belgium for a camping weekend instead, and it’ll rain.


But I did manage another quirky, historic, restored bridge yesterday, one that’s effectively only open to pedestrians and cyclists. (Cars can in theory use it, except there’s no road on the other side, only a dirt track.)

Horkstow Bridge (other pics), just 20 minutes’ bike ride south into Lincolnshire from the Humber Bridge, is one of Britain’s oldest surviving suspension bridges, dating from 1836. It's also John Rennie’s only suspension bridge, and without doubt the world’s most elegant bridge built solely to transport bricks across a canal. Men of punier aesthetic ambitions than Rennie would have just thrown them over.


Much of Horkstow Bridge’s charm is because it’s on the end of a remote country lane in a back-of-the-sofa part of England, on the end of a cul-de-sac. Which is an odd place for a bridge. A kind of pocket-sized Clifton Suspension Bridge, it’s only 133 feet long, 14 feet wide and 36 feet above the river, so the Hudson’s monster (6,700 feet long, 35 feet wide, 212 feet above the water) does rather dwarf it.

But as yet another little-England curio, best visited by bike (too far and boring to walk, too trivial to drive, but just right as a bike trip from the Humber Bridge) it’s rather fun. And you don't have to worry about pronouncing 'Poughkeepsie'.

London old and new: bikes are the difference

Propaganda, like a lot of TV presenters I expect, is more effective the less clever it is. So I've always rather liked the simple ploy of Sustrans's books: every single picture has a cyclist in it somewhere. The message is hardly subliminal, but it works: bikes are the right answer for everything.

I had this in mind last week. I was breezing around town taking a pictures for work of various London spots. They'd all been featured in an 1870s photo album recording the look of London's streets and buildings. (The entire album is on the British Library website.)

I was taking exactly the same views from the same spot, to show how things had changed, or not. It involved a few hours visiting around 25-30 places each for 15 minutes or so, all within a two-mile radius or so.


Yet another of those things impossible, or horribly cumbersome, by any other form of transport: a parking nightmare by car, a slow logistical slog by bus or tube, ludicrously expensive by taxi, way too far to walk.

But on a bike it was just a delightful way to spend a couple of half-days, nosing round back streets and lanes in the city that have been unchanged for over a century in their non-provision of bike parking.


The pictures, new and old, will feature on the blog of the next big British Library exhibition, the photographic blockbuster Points of View this winter. The three examples here are:
St John's Gate, Clerkenwell (top; see the 1870s version);
Canonbury Tower, Islington (bottom; see the 1870s version); and
Great St Helen's, off Bishopsgate (middle; see the 1870s version).

And, as you can see, I've done the Sustrans thing, and smuggled in cyclists wherever I could. Oh, very subtle. Maybe I have a career in propaganda. Or at least as a TV presenter.

Films of old London: but where's the bikes?

In the old days, central London's streets were full of bicycles, with traffic nothing like as scary as today... weren't they? Not according to the films of old London street scenes from 1896, 1903 and 1927 on London Screen Archive's YouTube channel.

In fact, what's striking is exactly how few cyclists there are, and how clogged and chaotic the streets look. Mind you, cycling doesn't look an attractive prospect in the horse-drawn era; I thought exhaust fumes were bad enough...

On Blackfriars Bridge in 1896, for example (above) - at the height of the cycling boom - there's only one cyclist to be seen.

In Old London Street Scenes from 1903, the streets look frighteningly busy, and totally cyclist-free, except for a couple of daring chaps just by Parliament Square.


The longest and most enjoyable film, despite its arf-arf intertitles, is Open Road (1927), thrillingly in colour (right). It shows some streets (going into Hyde Park, for instance) comically empty of motor vehicles compared to today.

But while there are a few more cyclists in evidence here, despite the tramlines, it's still not that many. My cyclist count is London Bridge 1; scene with copper directing traffic 1; Whitehall 2; Hyde Park Gate 1; Marble Arch 1; Petticoat Lane 0; Albert Embankment 0. (Or as TfL would have counted it had they been around then, London Bridge 435, Whitehall 924...)

Petticoat Lane was clearly too crowded to take a bike down. Evidently there was nothing to do on a Sunday in London in 1927 as a man except put on a cap and stand around looking gormless in the market with ten thousand other men while your wife cooked the roast.

Someone with a little bit of time, money and talent, which rules me out on three counts, could make a modern-day equivalent of all these scenes. It would be fascinating to compare.

Of course, some things haven't changed. Westminster had no cycle parking then either.

Training session in York

York, this is York. Please ensure you have all of your belongings with you when you leave the train.

What, all of my belongings? There’s racks of CDs in our house, and boxes of stuff up in my mum’s attic...

But today I was in York for work, so I just had to check out the station’s cycle parking (right). It puts the London termini to shame: Sheffield stand after Sheffield stand, as far as the eye can see.

The station also boasts this historic tilework map (right: click on it to see it in detail) of the rail network of north-east England as it was in the olden days, circa 1900.

You could get everywhere in East Yorkshire by train; most of it was uprooted in the Beeching era, and quite a few of them are now railtrails (Hull to Hornsea, part of the Trans Pennine Trail; and the wonderful Scarborough to Whitby, one of the country’s most underrated).

There's a discreet notice on the map warning you it might not necessarily reflect the sparse coverage of today, just in case anyone turns up thinking they can get to Withernsea without facing a very long ride into a cold easterly.
And finally... thanks to Northern Rail for opening up the bike closets (right) in their two-carriage trundlers, such as those plying the Hull-York backwaters. Previously, the space you see was closed up. Getting a bike in - especially one with handlebars the size of the antlers on a Highland manor's trophy head, like mine - was as cumbersome as trying to get a bike with handlebars the size of the antlers on a Highland manor's trophy head into the bike space on a Northern Rail train.

And finally and ultimately... hooray for National Express East Coast, whose website makes it easy to book not only your ticket, but also your bike reservation: all you have to do is tick a box.

Except of course it books you into Coach B, quarter of a mile away from your bike at the other end of the train. Not the most convenient situation when you get to Doncaster with only 30 seconds to sprint down to your bike. I couldn't run a four-minute mile, even with a considerable shortcut.