Free to go: Dr Bike tomorrow at Oval, Clapham

Dr Bike sessions are pretty regular things round London: council-subsidised roadside stalls where you can stop off on your morning or evening commute.

You get your bike checked over, and any simple maintenance work such as brake adjusting or gear tuning, all done for free.

There are two (extra ones, by popular demand) tomorrow in Lambeth on Cycle Superhighway 7: a morning one at Clapham Common from 7.30am-9.30am, and an evening one at the Oval from 5.30pm to 7.30pm.


We were at last Thursday's very well-attended Oval one (above and right), and it's the best site we've seen for a Dr Bike: right on a major commuting route, and prominently visible to cyclists stopped at the lights just beforehand, giving them plenty of time to see the stall and decide to stop.

It's also the ideal application for an underused, and not particularly otherwise usable (below), triangle of concrete sheared off from casual use by three fast main roads. So we think this is a good candidate for a semi-permanent, or at least more regular, showpiece Dr Bike location.


These are popular. The wait for a free mechanic can be half an hour in peak time. While waiting, you can stroll across to Oval station and pick up your free Evening Standard to read cover to cover. Still leaves another twenty-seven minutes to fill, though.

So we think a session here could be a candidate for a bike-powered smoothie-maker stall, catering for the captive market of cyclists queueing for their free work to be done. There's a small fortune to be made by someone. As ever in life though, it helps if you start with a large one.

Book review: Bicycle Maintenance

Bike maintenance is like a language: you learn it by doing it, not from a book. Except that without the book you won't know what to do in the first place.

Being able to look after a bike is a valuable skill, especially when you see what some bike chains charge you for a service - fifty quid for really, really basic stuff you can do easily at home in an hour. (Anyone who's ever been rushed two hundred quid for a basic survey on a house, which tells you things you could have worked out for yourself like how many rooms it's got, will know the feeling.)

Bicycle Maintenance is a new guidebook which tells you all this stuff. Clearly laid out in a magazine style, it covers the literal nuts and bolts, from simple cleaning and maintenance, through cable and bearing replacement, up to truing wheels. (This is the imperfect subjunctive of bike maintenance: too tricky for normal people in practice, but it's reassuring to know the theory.) It's written mainly from the mountain bike perspective, but addresses road bikes too (with their different gear shifters, for instance).

Getting confidence fixing bikes does need experience. The section on fixing punctures is fine, for instance, but the only way of learning how to put a tyre back on with your fingers, without needing tyre levers, is to do it: it's a craft. Adjusting indexing and gear ratios – which the book also covers comprehensively – is presumably the same, though that's a bridge too far for real cyclists like me. A wobbly bridge at that.

This looks a very good reference to have on your shelf. Bicycle Maintenance, by Guy Andrews and published by Dennis, is available from Amazon for £8.99. You may well see it in shops like Tesco and WH Smith, and it's also on sale through magbooks.com.

And no, if you buy it through that link, I don't get any commission. And no, I don't want to hear from anyone telling me how to set up affiliate links and sponsored advertisements to plaster my blog with in order to earn untold riches.