Sneaking bikes into the new BL exhibition

The British Library's latest exhibition, Points of View, has just started to some excellent reviews. The fascinating collection of 19th-century photos at St Pancras is free, runs until 7 March, and is conveniently visitable by bike.

A small part of the exhibition is a series of twenty-odd pictures of London sights in the 1870s compared with the identical views today. It's on an easily missable black pillar with a video display, towards the end of the end of the exhibition on the left.

The two pictures on the right are an example: the celebrated (and bike-friendly) George Inn in Southwark.

All the series is being featured on the Points of View exhibition blog, starting with the George.


The 'now' pictures were all taken by me this summer. The ideal way to do it was by bike, of course. It was therefore a fine excuse for being paid for a few days' leisurely cycling round London in the sun, taking snaps, and stopping to research each location thoroughly. (This isn't typical of working at the British Library; it's not usually that hectic.)

The 1870s pictures, sadly, don't feature any velocipede or 'penny-farthing' riders. So I did my best to smuggle cyclists into the 'now' pictures wherever possible.

No doubt there was a debate in the 1870s between the 'real' cyclists (normal, everyday, comfy clothing such as frock coat, high collar and top hat; sensible luggage carrier such as a Gladstone bag) and the sports cyclists (lightweight penny-farthings weighing only a few stone; Devonshire serge jacket in hi-vis dark green, knickerbockers, Stanley helmet with small peaks and Cambridge grey stockings - the uniform specified for the founding members of the Cycle Touring Club).

As with the pictures, some things change, some things stay the same. As my mum says sagely, it's like everything else.

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.

Bike parking is always Wellcome

Hooray! Bike parking has at last gone in outside the Wellcome Collection on Euston Road, another of London's overlooked but splendidly visitable free attractions (right).

It follows a few months of gentle persistence with emails, trying to persuade the Collection to persuade the council, and it's worked, so hooray.

Three Sheffield stands isn't much, and already they're full, with spare street furniture still being used as overflow parking. No doubt a Wellkom Collectie in Amsterdam would have space for 23,000 bikes and their cafe would sell you spliffs as well as five-quid paninis. But it's a start.

And it's better than shackling the bikes up to the only available railings, which are in the middle of Euston Road, putting you at the mercy of heat-seeking wing mirrors.

Inside, there's a spacious entrance hall with an Antony Gormley hanging upside down from the ceiling and a nice cafe and bookshop (right).

Upstairs are the collections. They include gee-whiz interactives that can measure your height to within one metre and your pulse rate to the nearest hundred. There are also great activity areas for kids and childish adults like us.

There's a large room of cases full of medical implements used for hacking diseased offal from Regency paupers, ancient Japanese sex toys, historical artificial limbs and so on, and in the main gallery (right) there's a model showing what happens if you eat chips every day and don't cycle.

But a black mark nevertheless to the Wellcome Collection for not mentioning bikes at all on their website.

Just up the road, the British Library's visit-us page, by comparison, is very positive about bikes, highlighting their excellent cycle parking (right) and even giving you tips on how to use the tfl.gov's route planner to best effect.

But then it should do, seeing as I edited that page.

Taking Liberties exhibition cycle tour of London

I'm currently working at the British Library, editing the website of their exhibition Taking Liberties, the 900-year struggle for Britain's freedoms and rights.

This has involved taking several dozen pictures of London sites associated with exhibition items. The shop where Thomas Paine's Rights of Man was sold in 1791, for example; the house of feminist pioneer Mary Wollstonecraft; or the building where the committee for the abolition of the slave trade first met in 1787.

The stop-start process of snapping all these locations, many of them in central London or the City, would have been unmaginably tedious by public transport, with lots of foot-slogging and Oyster-bashing. And by car it would have been impossible. But on a bike, the process was great fun, taking me through lots of Dickensian lanes and passages, and to little enclaves I'd never otherwise have seen.

And gloriously expanding my knowledge of back-alley pubs. For instance, just down the lane from where the worthy abolitionists first met in 1787 is a pub called the Jamaica Wine House (top right), ironically then a meeting-place for the slave-ship masters. It's virtually unchanged from those days, except for a fresh lick of paint, a new front door, and everything inside.

And visiting by bike is the best way to enjoy the psychogeography of these sites and their contribution to history. So I've put some of my favourite Taking Liberties sites on this Google map, and sketched out a suggested cycle route to thread them together.


View Larger Map
There's a large picture for each site, and a link to the relevant item in the Online Exhibition.

I've only chosen central London locations, and any one-way streets used assume you're going clockwise overall. There are many other locations on the exhibition website's various Google maps.

For example, Magna Carta fans might be interested in cycling out virtually all along the river on the Thames Path to Runnymede, perhaps coming back from Windsor by train. En route you might pop in to St Mary's church by Putney Bridge: the site of the Putney Debates of 1647, where following the overthrow of Charles I, the people discussed what the new Republic of England should be like, and what should be in the British Constitution. Being Britain, that's still at the committee stage.

Further afield, there's one of the caves that claims to be the one where Robert Bruce had his encounter with the spider (top right, accompanying our various exhibits on Scottish independence).

I was there in autumn last year with my chums Mark and Si, cycling from Carlisle to Edinburgh one weekend. We were cycling in Dumfries, just past Gretna, through the village of Kirkpatrick Fleming (which put me in mind of Kirkpatrick Macmillan, the man who didn't invent the bicycle). I saw a sign to the cave, and couldn't resist the diversion.


Mark and I scrambled down the muddy path to the entrance of the cave (top right). It is man-made, hollowed out of the rock halfway up a cliff-face as a hidey-hole for treasure. Now there's a wooden access walkway. Our luck was in: the original spider's web was still there (below right).

I was delighted, partly because I'd seen the historic spider, but mainly because I could legitimately take a picture for the website and thereby make the whole weekend tax-deductible.