Humber Bridge is herm sweet herm

I'm up in Hull again, where I grew up. It was famously adjudged Britain's Most Crap Town in 2003 - narrowly edging out Cumbernauld and Morecambe – though that was followed by a counter-chorus of support from people who'd had good student times there and were rather fond of the place. (Well, yeah, but... I had a great time as a student in New Cross.) It's now best known to many as the Premiership side that didn't quite get relegated this season, which is a step up I suppose.

It's also touted as a cycling city, with 12 per cent of journeys to work made by bike according to the 2001 Census. As I've never actually had a job in Hull, like all too many of its inhabitants, I can't comment on the feeling of rush-hour on Alfred Gelder Street. But that figure is four times higher than London's. So take that you poncy load of southern soft-lifers, with your cappuccino machines and organic tofu and four-grand road bikes. You want real cycling? Then ditch your helmet and migraine-coloured jacket and pedal a creaking house-clearance Raleigh Wayfarer to a chip shop on Hessle Road.


But watch out. Within the hour you'll be picking up that lercal accent where you say er ner, me merbarl phern's bin sterlen. It happens to me, too: gradually my central RP vowels shift erver to the East Cerst, and that bland BBC intonation resorts to a windswept Holderness lilt.

Anyway, Hull still offers a world-beating experience: to ride across the Humber Bridge. When it opened in 1981, it was the longest single-span suspension bridge in the world, with towers 1410m apart. Today it’s only fifth in the main-span league table. But if you turn up on your bike hoping to cross the Akashi-Kaikyo in Japan (1991m), Xihoumen in China (1650m), Great Belt in Denmark (1624m), or the Runyang in China (1490m), you’ll be turned away, because they don't allow bikes.

Well, sod the lot of them! Come to the longest bridge in the world that welcomes cyclists instead! The estuary may be the sort of brown usually found on stray dogs; the most vertical points on the surrounding scenery may be the distant hazy smokestacks of Grimsby and Immingham; and it may only join a city of 300,000 people on one side with some turnip fields on the other. But you can enjoy it by bike!


And cycling is, in fact, the ideal way to enjoy the world’s fifth-longest – but still best – single-span suspension bridge. In a car you can’t stop to admire the engineering; on foot it’s just too damn far across. But bike pace, as usual, is just right. You feel the awesome scale and precarious isolation in the middle, but you’re only a few minutes from coffee and cairk.

The north side – with Hull on it – has gorra large car park and viewing area right next to the tower. There’s alser a friendly information centre, and thuzza cafe wot's erpen every day. Therra some sarns worrell tek yer to the shared pedestrian-cycle footpath on the west saird. Thuz another path ont' east saird burrit alwez seems ter be clersed these days. The path's quite ward and smooth anywair. And thuz them big towers wot look like rocket launchers.


Ah ner it dunt look owt, burrit's the second merst daingerous shippin lairn in't werld aftert' Orinercer. It's cuz of all them sandbars wot keep shiftin. Y'ner all them berts wot ger past? Well, thev gorra stop at Spern Point and wairt for Umber Parlot ter cummun gerron an' tek it upt' river to Goole. Teks yiyas ter becum a Parlot.

Thuz a lerd more ont' bridge in me book, 50 Quairky Bike Rards.

Tate tete-a-tete at 8

Hooray! Tate Modern is evidently letting us stick our bikes on the railings outside the main entrance again, after their recent mystery ban.

The railings are much handier than the official bike shed, and more flexible, with multiple locking points. They're used much more.


And then you can go up to the bar on Floor 7 for one of London's best evening barstool views: a half-panoramic sweep of the Thames with St Paul's, the Wobbly Bridge etc. You can always grab a spot by the window, the wine's not too expensive, and you can watch the townscape watercolours change as the sun sags low and pink.


The inverted camera-obscura view through a wine glass is particularly enjoyable. And your transport home is right outside. We like biking round London.

Pet project: bike to work via a cemetery

Biking was the only way to get into work today anyway on such a glorious sunny May morning. But on a bike you can do extra stuff before work in a way that would be just too damn tedious by tube or bus or car. We had an 8.15am appointment in Hyde Park, and getting there via the Houses of Parliament, Buckingham Palace and Wellington Arch, was a delight.

(And, incidentally, at Parliament Square bikes and buses can now turn right directly from the north end of Westminster Bridge into Whitehall. Saves having to go round four sides of a square. And having to identify the latest lot of protesters and deciding what's outrageous and has got to stop this time.)


In Hyde Park we were meeting with someone from the Parks to see the Pet Cemetery, one of London's quirkier hidden gems. It's not open to the public; you have to email the Parks and they fix up a private view for you. It's just inside the park in the garden of Victoria House, opposite Lancaster Gate tube, now a private residence. You can't see much from Bayswater Road though you can glimpse the headstones through the railings.

The Pet Cemetery provided an informal burial ground for dogs and cats of wealthy Londonites and operated from the late 1800s to the early 1900s. The last animal grave is dated 1956.


Not much into pets, me: sheepdogs yes, lapdogs no. But there's something gently touching about these memorials to once much-loved companion animals. Here lie Titsy, Fluff, Quex, Ba-ba and Phisto. This is the final resting place of Wobbles, Topsy, Chips, Pippin, Scum and Smut. Beneath us are the mortal remains of Scamp, Yum Yum, Tosh, Bogie, Flossie and Punch. In this spot is commemorated Ginger Blyth of Westbourne Terrace, not some wartime air-ace, but King of Pussies.

It was an invitation to ponder on mortality and the looming nemeses of HGVs turning left. All I could think of was breakfast, though.

In search of Henry VIII

There are several Henry VIII exhibitions on right now, marking the 500th anniversary since he became king in 1509. I've been doing various things for the British Library's website for their Henry VIII exhibition, including this Google map of a bike tour taking in some Henry-related sites, and sights, in London. Unfortunately, like the monasteries, there's not a lot of them left. Greenwich Palace, where he was born, for example, is a fabulous place to visit by bike, linked to central London by a characterful riverfront path - but Wren's magnificent old naval college you see today is a century and a half post-Henry.

View Henry VIII, Man and Monarch in a larger map

Traces of Henry's boyhood home at Eltham Palace remain in the shape of the Great Hall, but almost everything else there is 1930s (and it costs £8.30 to visit, and isn't an enticing bike ride). Syon House, a dissolved monastery in Brentford where Catherine Howard was imprisoned, is all a relatively recent rebuild.


Parts of the great Tudor Whitehall Palace, including the real tennis court, remain inside the Cabinet Office at 10 Downing St as part of a warren of secret tunnels and hideyholes. But you'll only ever see that if you become a cabinet minister. Despite Mr Cameron's kind invitation to me to stand as a Tory MP even without political experience, I think it's unlikely. There are other things higher on my wish-list, such as undergoing root canal work without anaesthetic.

You can cycle out west along the Thames Path to Hampton Court. Half of this was Henry's palace (once he'd nicked it off Wolsey) and he'd definitely feel at home there today (in fact he'd probably try to nick it back off Historic Royal Palaces). The other half is a baroque addition, which any fool can see is post-Tudor architecture. So, not the Daily Mail's picture caption writers, then. ('Looks just as regal five centuries after its construction', they say of the patently 200-year old part.) That's also a lovely ride, which you might combine with some Thames Crossings. Entry to Hampton Court Palace is £14 but you can spend a whole day there and they seem well-disposed to cyclists. They also have some temporary and permanent Henry exhibitions on.

In today's central London, though, our map has only four places that Henry would recognise: the Tower; Lambeth Palace; Westminster Abbey; and St James's Palace (above right).


Henry must have had fond memories of the Tower (right), partly because he lived here briefly after his father's death, but mainly because he had Anne Boleyn and Catherine Howard executed there (More...).

The Tower is Bloody £17 to visit, though apparently if you turn up on a Sunday and say you're going to the church service, they have to let you in free. Inside the walls, the Tower complex has the feel of a half-quaint Sussex village. We think it's a bit overrated, in the way that locals always do about tourist tick-boxes. You can feel the atmosphere from your bike without going in by cycling north across Tower Bridge. Come off right and double back on yourself to go under the bridge, then pedal-cum-push west along the riverfront path in front of the Tower.


Lambeth Palace (right), facing the Houses of Parliament, is said to be the most complete Tudor building in London you can see from the roadside.

Come in the evening when its earthy red bricks glow in the fat orange sun and then sit outside Pico Bar, down by Vauxhall Station, for a cheap and cheerful tapas dinner, and you can glow too.


Westminster Abbey (right) is very much as Henry would remember it, and he'd be delighted to see all those dead people inside. He married Catherine of Aragon here in 1509 (and lest we forget, stayed married to her for 20 years, which these days would be long and faithful enough to be in the local paper).

To go inside costs a whopping £15; if you just want the atmosphere, wander with your bike through the alley of Dean's Yard, behind the grand facades on the south-west side, into the Oxbridge-college-like quad of the school behind. Don't expect bike parking though.


St James's Palace (right), round the corner from Buckingham Palace, is still officially a 'working palace'. If that's work, Harry and Will, I wouldn't mind doing it for a living. Its main gate on Pall Mall (right) is pretty much as it was when Henry had this as one of his 54 second homes; his expenses claims have kept historians amused ever since.

Round the side (very top right) is a picturesque lane that gives you the idea of what cycling would have been like in Tudor times. However, the sporty, slim young Henry happily used to spend eight or nine hours out hunting on his horse, so he would probably have been a road cyclist rather than a tourer.

Lies, damned lies, and Euston cycle parking

Boris Johnson was in Trafalgar Square yesterday, 'kick-starting London's cycling revolution' according to the Transport for London press release. (Er, guys, you don't kick-start a bike. You kind of push it off, put your bum on the saddle, and grab the handlebars with elbows pointing out... but you do have to know the difference between arse and elbow...)

Some events we knew about already (such as London Freewheel coming on 20 Sep). But the main news was the £111m budget promised on a series of radical, visionary and entirely new cycle infrastructure projects, such as Boris's London Bike HIre Scheme and Boris's Cycle Superhighways. Funny, I thought we'd been promised all these in February 2008, except that then they were Ken's London Bike Hire Scheme and Ken's Cycle Superhighways... and that the budget then was £500m.


I know the difference is paltry these days, but a third of a billion here, a third of a billion there - it can add up, you know. But as we all know, 91 per cent of statistics are just plucked out the air. The only new figure in the press release was TfL's assertion that an 'estimated' 545,000 journey are now made by bike per day in London, and that cycling levels have gone up by 9 per cent in the last year.

Now, I doubt those figures come from published, peer-reviewed research - more like PR-reviewed, as real cyclist Ben Goldacre's Bad Science column might say - but look: it certainly feels like cycling levels have nudged up in the last year, and if we can quote that figure to councillors or developers when trying to persuade them to remember cyclists, that's fine by me.


Boris says in the press release that his intention is 'making London a city where two wheeled, pedal-powered transportation is the norm, and not the exception'. Great, but there's still a long way to go: only 3 per cent of trips in the capital are made by bike. My intention is to have a career where being on holiday is the norm, not the exception; but I've a long way to go there too.

But a positive thing from that press release to end. It mentions 138 new cycle parking spaces in Euston station. They were evidently unveiled yesterday, and were already filling up when I nipped round in the early afternoon to have a look (all pics).

They're more mechanical than we're used to, to the extent of needing instructions. Given the problems most of us have assembling a flat-pack office desk I wondered if it was a challenge too far, but people were evidently getting the hang of it OK.


Now, 138 is nowhere near enough (and St Pancras up the road is still woefully and disgracefully short of cycle parking; its paltry few dozen spaces were only installed in the face of a cycle protest the day the international station opened). But something's happening, and figures show that, 95 per cent of the time, it's better for something to happen than nothing.

The latest gossip on the Boris lorry story, by the way, is that it was a tipper truck (paid by the load, and hence incentivised to go like hell) whose back doors were being held shut by a coat hanger, which was dislodged when the driver did his Dukes of Hazzard thing over the speedbump.

If so, this was a stupid and dangerous use of a perfectly good coat hanger, which should have been in its proper place - that is, impromptu replacement for a stolen radio aerial on a 1978 Ford Capri.

The Boris lorry story

The story of Boris Johnson's group cycling trip nearly being mass-murdered by a lorry grew over the weekend from internet gossip, to a Guardian politics story complete with video, to a BBC Sunday evening main news item, in between Susan Boyle getting promoted and Newcastle getting relegated.

I've little to add to what others have said. After being nearly crushed twice yesterday evening on the way home, once by a French lorry and once by a bendy bus, I'm not in the mood. And it particularly irritated me that not until I got home did I remember the French for 'Oy, *****! **** back to Clermont-Ferrand and **** your **** with a *****'.

Still, at least the French guy spoke reasonable English, which is more than could be said for the bus driver.

Freewheeler's blog has a worthwhile summary of the Boris incident and reactions. It doesn't allow comments, so I've responded to him below.

Elegy for a worn-out wheel

Something was puzzling me over the weekend. My front wheel was going thp, thp, thp: one thp per revolution, especially noticeable when braking.

Usually this is down to a broken spoke that causes the wheel rim to go slightly out of shape. To find which spoke is broken you play the wheel like a harp, producing the sort of twink-twonk-twink-blup melody that you get a first for in Goldsmiths composition classes, whereas if you write a piano sonata you only get a 2:1. The blup is the dodgy spoke, and you take it to Bob the Wheel Builder on Walworth Road and he fixes it for a fiver while you wait and off you go.

But all the spokes were fine, twink-twonk-twink-twonk like a prize-winning etude for rubber band. It was only when I looked at the rim that I saw the problem. The wheel rim itself was worn out and had started to disintegrate. The thp-thp was caused by a rapidly-growing buckle and split at its edge, and the rims themselves had been worn concave by four years of daily braking.

Wow. Maybe time for a new wheel. Like, this morning. And maybe take the bus to work.