New cycle cafe holds balance of power

Well, I'm still clinging on to the hope that a Conservative-Unionist coalition and a Labour-Lib Dem coalition end up with exactly the same number of seats, meaning that the Greens, with their one seat in Brighton, hold the balance of power.

Anyway, here's a place that gets my vote. It's a new cycling cafe in the City called Look Mum No Hands, at 49 Old St, just north of the Barbican. There's a few such bike-bistros in the capital now, and this new one is really good.


We're impressed. It does very good coffee, cakes and bistro-style salady meals (as well as reasonably-priced bottles of wine), and there's a bike workshop, so you can have your bike repaired while you wait.


It's also well cool, decorated with snazzy bikes of various types and cycling-related photos. It's racing-ish, but not exclusively: anyone on a bike, whether time trialler, courier, tourer or city trundler, will feel right at home. I saw a couple of cappuccino-sipping customers busy on laptops (there's free wifi, too) with Bromptons folded up at their feet.


And its parking is exemplary: not just racks outside, but a courtyard with loads more racks, Plantlocks, and quirky wall-mounted Cyclocs: plenty of outside-eating space where you can keep an eye on your tandem, trailer or Christiania.


It's fab; give it a visit. I can see this becoming a regular meeting-place for London cyclists of all types. Even those who didn't vote for the winners yesterday.

Vote for cycling. Er, which party's that?

Turnout looked pretty good at our local polling station at 9am this morning. The steady stream of voters included six on bikes during the two minutes it took me to pin the tail on the donkey in our council elections.

Not bad considering you can't even cycle here, in the middle of a pedestrianised estate.

(As it happens, I knew two of our council candidates through cycling. Are cyclists more liable to be politically active on a practical level than most? Vote now: press Y for yes, N for no, or ESC to try and get away from all this sodding election coverage.)


As the LCC claimed in the Evening Standard the other day, cyclists could hold the balance of power at this election. That seems a trifle hopeful to us, like plankton claiming to hold the balance of power in whale feeding frenzies.

Still, it takes just two minutes to vote. And think of the difference that two minutes will make over the next five years to the status of cycling in Britain.

Oh.

Narrowing experience: Roadworks block Elephant bike path

Work installing the Cycle Superhighways continues apace. This sign has appeared on Churchyard Row, currently part of the Elephant and Castle cycle bypass, and part of the future CS7 from Merton to the City.


Unfortunately, the works don't leave much space for cyclists using the bypass, which purports to offer a safe alternative to the Elephant's lethal double-roundabout. Especially when they have to share it with pedestrians, whose footway is completely obstructed.

It seems a lot of fuss just for painting a blue stripe on the road...

Cheers! Brewer celebrates bike trip with special ale

We spotted this special cycling beer on sale in a Shropshire pub over the weekend, during a biking break in the hills round Church Stretton.

The one-off 30-60 Challenge ale comes from Wood Brewery, based in Craven Arms (that's a place, not a pub). It marks a bike trip by its MD, Edward Wood. He's celebrating his 60th birthday (and the 30th of the brewery) by cycling from Land's End to John O'Groats, and he starts today (he's on Twitter, too).

Edward is raising money for Midlands Air Ambulance, and 10p from every pint goes towards to the charity. The deliciously hoppy brew quickly became the official beer of our weekend too. In the Green Dragon pub in Little Stretton - which, incidentally, does quite the best pub chips any of us could remember - we must have contributed enough to buy them a helicopter already.

Good luck, Edward. We think the idea of celebratory biking brews is an outstanding one. Perhaps you might do some commissions for us, too, when you get back?

Anyway, here's some ideas for one-off, London-based, cycling ales:
• Cycling Superhighways Special - identical to beer that was there before, only coloured blue
• Boris Blond - lots of fizz and energy, flows smoothly, but no taste
• Council Cream - dull and thin; only comes in half-measures, and liable to give headaches
• TfL Tipple - mostly froth, and a watered-down feel

Routing it out: Two new London guidebooks

There's no money in writing cycle guide books. I have this joke about my 50 Quirky Bike Rides in England and Wales: "With the royalties, I've bought a pied à terre in Borough Market. Er, no, not a pied à terre, what's the word...? Pomme de terre, that's it..."

So it's no surprise that there's surprisingly few good books on London cycling routes. But two new ones have recently come out: The London Cycling Guide (New Holland, 224pp, £10.99) by Tom Bogdanowicz, and 25 London Cycle Routes (downloadable e-book, 108pp, £6.95) by London Cyclist blogger Andreas Kambanis.

Tom's (top right) is the more comprehensive, with 30 routes plus a few family-friendly park circuits, more information on each ride, and forty-odd pages of general up-to-date info about cycling in London, buying a bike, fixing a puncture and so on. Andreas's (bottom right) has the benefit of live links within the PDF, and the full set of GPS coordinates that you can feed to your iPhone or whatever.


Both are clearly set out and their routes easy to follow. Tom's is clearly a team effort, produced with the input of borough groups, and publishing house resources; he's strong on detail, history and architecture, and he took the well-bike-populated photos himself. Andreas's is more personal and quirky, and he utilises Flickr images, which are more atmospheric but lack bikes. Both base their maps on open-source material (OpenStreetMap and OpenCycleMap respectively).

If facts and detail are important to you, go for Tom's book: there are a few slips in Andreas's (Ham House is in the wrong place, Brydges Place is 33 not 15 inches wide, and that's a funny looking sheep on page 32, for instance). But you may prefer his lively and personal approach to Tom's more traditional, guidebooky style.

All the routes look fun, though, and any in either book will be rewarding - Tom's routes tend to explore one geographical area, while Andreas's tend to the more thematic.

Are either of these the London guidebook we've been waiting for, then? Well, no, obviously. That's going to be my 50 Quirky Bike Rides in London.

No, just joking. It's too much work for a potato.

Have bike, wood be prepared to travel

We spotted this fine pair of hand-crafted wooden mudguards the other Saturday in Broadway Market, just off Regents Canal in Hackney.


The bike was chained to a gate by a sign saying 'Bicycles chained to this gate will be removed'. The mudguards were done by a furnituremaker friend of the owner who specialises in this sort of thing.

Impervious to rust, but Dutch elm disease might be a problem.

Pavement cycling is OK in Clapham

Clapham has a street called The Pavement, on the north side of the common.



So, tee hee, you can cycle on The Pavement and the tabloids can't touch you.


There are plenty more Pavements. York has one you can cycle on, for instance, not far from The Shambles.


While we're on funny street names, we were reminded while parking off Trafalgar Square the other day that the pedestrian lane off it to the east has surely the longest name of anything in London you can push a bike through: St Martin-in-the-Fields Church Path.

Which (at 29 letters, or possibly 38 characters, depending on how you count abbreviations or spaces) is longer than the longest proper-street name, the 26-letter Stoke Newington Church Street.