Bike Monopoly 0: Go

This is a new series of posts. Each weekday for the next eight weeks we'll look at successive squares on the traditional English-pattern Monopoly board game, and examine each of the 40 locations or events from the cyclist's point of view.

Go, well, it just has to be a green signal. That means go. Or, if you're cyclists as imagined by most drivers, a red signal.


So the obvious London location to represent Go is the bewildering Traffic Light Tree (right) at Westferry Circus, on the western edge of Canary Wharf.

(It's on one of the routes in my 50 Quirky Bike Rides book. See map of route)

It's a work of art, constructed in 1998 by Pierre Vivant (born Paris, 1952). The random patterns are meant to represent the restlessness of business there, but now their mixed signals seem a grimly accurate description of the economy.


Other notable green lights include the one you use to cross from The Mall (if you were cycling from your home in Buckingham Palace, for instance) to Wellington Arch (right).

(It's on another of the routes in my 50 Quirky Bike Rides book. See map of route)

It allows you just four seconds to get across, and is London's only pedestrian crossing equipped with starting blocks.

Where am I? You're in a bike lane, stupid

So, what emergency forced this chap to block the bike lane on Baylis Rd, near Waterloo, yesterday afternoon?

Yup: he'd lost his way and was gawping at the map like it was Linear B or something.

He really should use a satnav - preferably one programmed on startup to say, 'Walk to the station and take the train instead'.

Don't worry, I told him where to go. Politely, of course.

The meaning of ding

Next Wednesday, 9 September, is the second annual Ding Day. Whenever you see another cyclist, you're supposed to give a quick greeting on your bicycle bell, which they will cheerily return.

My bell is a bit rubbish: a weedy little ting, the sort favoured by hotel receptions so that when guests angrily summon the concierge to complain about their room they just look ridiculous. I want one of those chunky things you crank up with your thumb that sound like a 1950s fire engine.

The problem with ding, as we know, is that it can mean many things. To one person on the canal towpath it's a friendly notification that you'd like to come through, when convenient, hello nice day, how's it going, thanks very much. To the next it's a reason for them to tut, take out one of their iPod earpieces and move grudgingly aside, but only after you've already stopped.

But most pedestrians just don't seem to understand ding. Groups of foreign-language students in Bloomsbury back streets. Strolling families in a side-by-side line that blocks the whole towpath. The sheep-people at pedestrian crossings who keep on crossing even though the little man turned red half a minute ago. They all gawp at you, your bell an incomprehensible smear of Martian noise.

Then I realised: it's all down to tones. Like Mandarin or Cantonese, the meaning of a bicycle bell's ring depends on the intonation and the context.

So here's your guide to the various ways of pronouncing ding, and what it means.

Scarborough-Whitby: Britain's best railtrail? Count on it

The 25-mile Scarborough to Whitby railtrail (all pictures), part of National Cycle Route 1, is one of the best cycle experiences in Britain, yet it’s curiously overlooked.

It’s longer, more scenic, more varied, and more convenient than the much more feted Camel Trail for instance. But we know the world sometimes works like that: Avebury vs Stonehenge, Shackleton vs Apollo 13, Monro vs Sinatra.


Anyway, it’s fabulous: a real must-do. You get superb coastal views, woodsy intimacy, a hint of heather-coated moorland, characterful pubs and friendly tea shops, a thrilling viaduct, and sturdy town splendour at both ends.

You might see sheepdogs hard at work too, and compare them to your own dog that expects a choc drop just for fetching a stick, and wonder which is more intelligent.

The ride profile is M-shaped, centred on Robin Hood’s Bay, a vertically-laned Cornish fishing village miraculously teleported to the north Yorkshire coast. Whichever way you go, therefore, you end up with a long coast downhill. South to Scarborough that’s about ten miles of mostly-freewheeling.


With rail access at both ends, you can do it one way easily. (Going by train between Whitby and Scarborough is possible but very roundabout and takes 5-6 hours though.) Or you can do it there and back in a day: a full 50-mile day, but a glorious one.

This is a route with a leisurely 1960s feel, where you can take your time. No wonder so many period telly dramas are made here – TV crews are famous for taking their time too.


The surface is cindertrack, a bit of tarmac, or pebbly chalk – fine on a hybrid, doable on a laden tourer or sturdy road bike.

The people that run the pubs and teashops smilingly welcome cyclists blundering in spattered with mud and dripping all over the place after being caught by a thunderstorm, as we were, no doubt because they’ve had a lot of practice at it.


Fish and chip fans recognise Whitby as the world’s best place to see a long queue outside a restaurant. The Magpie Cafe is the most celebrated place to eat, and you can spend a happy hour chatting to backpackers from round the world and local families from up the road and progressing about eight foot.

There are lots of other fish and chip places too, takeaway and eat-in, and you can tell the best ones because they have the longest lines waiting to be served. You’ll need patience, but if you’ve come from Scarborough up that long initial incline with little scenery for the first ten miles, you’ll know about patience.


And the most entertaining thing about Whitby is the Goths. You see them wandering about, couples in Victorian cloaks and long skirts and top hats and long dyed black hair and vampire makeup and Specsavers glasses. You think they’re publicising some future am-dram performance and have run out of leaflets. Nope: they’re here in homage to Count Dracula, because this is Bram Stoker country.

I'm not sure that the Count was quite so keen on tragus piercings and labrets - perhaps he was a bit squeamish - but the spirit of Dracula lives on in Whitby town centre: we had a narrow escape with one car, whose driver clearly had no use for a mirror.

Hull of a lot of bike parking

Hull sees itself as a cycling city. We’re told that in terms of biking to work, it’s in the top five towns, though they must have done well to find enough people who actually do have a job. This is routinely credited to the flatness of the place: the only place for learner drivers to practise a hill start is a railway bridge near the station.

But as any real cyclist can tell you, flatness actually does have its downside. Flat equals wind, and headwinds on the way there have a curous habit of turning round to be headwinds on the way back too. Every journey uphill puts height in the bank which you cash in on eventually; but wind can be totally unfair and break your heart. Hull is windy and it is cold, so there’s clearly something more to the cycling levels than simple ironing-board geography; probably to do with cycling culture being self-sustaining.


Bike parking may have something to do with it too. Hull’s city centre offers more bike parking than we’ve seen anywhere else in England, over 900 places, their handy free cycle map informs us, ocnfirmed by our researches this week: hooray! Newland Avenue, a trendifying coffee-shop area near the university, even offers you covered bike parking (top) handy for all those student hangouts.


There’s so much bike parking, in fact, that some of it can be left spare for use to prop up signs directing you to local businesses (above right) or, most bizarrely, for anchoring rubbish bins (right). This wasn’t an isolated example – we counted several more. Does the council have a problem with rubbish bins being stolen if not left secured? Perhaps Hull’s unfortunate reputation for crime is worse than we thought.


Yet even Hull’s lavish provision of cycle stands doesn’t convince everyone. Like many other Yorkshire folk (and yes, Hull’s in Yorkshire again, not the hated and non-lamented old Humberside) the people of Hull are easily unimpressed. Railings are still more attractive to some (right).

Hull's bike museum shows how it's all changed... not

There are around 20 cycle museums, or museums with a strong cycle element, in Britain. The biggest is the one in Llandrindod Wells in mid-Wales (if you’ve ever cycled the Welsh National Cycle Route from Cardiff to Holyhead, most of Wales seems to be mid-Wales). Camelford in Cornwall (handy for the Camel Trail) has another major collection.

But one of my favourite cycle collections is at Streetlife, Hull’s likeable transport museum, and not just because it’s free.


Their substantial bicycle gallery has the usual range of early machines, from boneshakers (right) through ‘penny-farthings’ to the modern diamond-frame.

There’s an early Pedersen (below), a kind of pedallable Eiffel Tower, a design you still occasionally see in genuine use today.

The information panels and displays show that the social questions raised in the early days of cycling have a surprisingly modern feel.

Folding bicycles for instance (for use in war; presumably the troop ships and trains taking them to the front line had a strict no-non-folding-bikes policy on busy routes).


Or feminism (one Tessie Reynolds, we’re told, caused a scandal in 1893 when she rode from London to Brighton on a man’s bike wearing trousers; sounds like my kind of gal).

Or car conflict. Reckless early motorists were known as ‘speed fiends’ or ‘road hogs’: “they were a hideous sort of thing,” one panel informs us, “and the occupants were generally dressed up in a manner more representing monkeys than anything else. They travelled along at what they considered their legal rate – the supposed 20 m.p.h. - killing and maiming men, women and children, and driving everyone else from the road with their hideous noise and wretched dust...” A century on, little has changed.


Or, indeed, anti-cyclist propaganda in the media. A cartoon is reproduced from the early 1900s showing a mad cyclist (a “scorcher”) mowing down a harmless plod valiantly trying to protect the public from the two-wheeled menace.

That rant was against a cyclist using the road; and we think today’s pavement-cycling hysteria is bad enough...

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'.