Annual meatup: Smithfield Nocturne

Smithfield Nocturne - a summer evening of serious and amusing races on the streets of the meat market, specially closed for the purpose - is one of the highlights of the cycling year. There's lots of stalls and sideshows stuff, well-spectated, and all very sociable.

It ran yesterday afternoon and evening, was enormous fun, and as usual it was cloudy and threatened rain all day. They really should try holding it in summer one year.


I mention it in my column for Cycling Plus magazine this month, observing (in addition to the usual 13 jokes) that although there's plenty of dead serious road racing, the most popular item is the Commuter Race.

Participants, dressed city-style in collar and tie and shorts, start off with a mass run to their folding bikes, stampeding like a Waterloo concourse mob whose platform has just been announced. They then unfold, mount and race a few laps. At last, a race for Real Cyclists.

One of the points I make in my column is that the Tour de France will never make it that big in the UK because we don't go for all that serious stuff. We prefer a touch of pantomime.


Indeed, the biggest cheers were not for the winner, but for the leisurely young woman in a tutu who just waved at everyone, the bloke in drag, and the elegant white-tuxedo chap who came second to last but was clearly the best dressed.


This year, there was a new item. In my column (and my review of last year's Nocturne) I jokily suggested they should introduce more novelty races, including a Real Business Race, where ice-cream vendors sell as they go to spectators.

Well, they did: an ice-cream-bike race. Vendors had not only to do a lap on their cargo bikes, but also sell a specified number of ice creams en route.

Maybe I should sell my services to HTC, sponsors of the event, as a futurologist.

Cymbal of success: London's cycle boom, boom

The purpose of certain things is a mystery to science. Male nipples. Drum solos. The cycle lane at the north end of Blackfriars Bridge.

The third may well never be explained. And before you all write in, we know that the first is a consequence of the way embryos develop as 'default female'.

The standard explanation for percussion solos is that drummers, having so much kit, are the ones with the van. So the rest of the group have to suffer them, because they need the lift home.

However, this is clearly not the case with the drum-kit cyclist Puncturekit, alias busker David Osborne (above). His drum kit is his transport. He's adapted his road bike so it unfolds into a drum kit with five cymbals, three snare drums and a foot pedal. After his gigs, he reassembles it as a bike and rides home.


We first saw him in action a couple of years ago in a Hackney park. Things have moved on since, as the Evening Standard's article on him last year reported.

And on Saturday David was at work in Oxford St (right), exploiting the canyon acoustics of its side streets.

Now, if only Brompton could get going on this idea... I'm sure its designer and slide-rule meister Andrew Ritchie could devise cyclable vibraphones, pedalled tubular bells, bicycle marimbas. Being an itinerant orchestral percussionist would be so much easier.

Wholly true, Batman: Alfred rides a Moulton

Alfred, the butler in the camp 1960s kids' TV series Batman, rode a Moulton. He called it the Alfbike, and used it to help rescue Batman when the Batbike broke down.

I learned this at a party on Friday from a Moulton fan. Obviously I don't believe anything I hear at parties, and assumed it was just the beer talking. (I can often hear the beer talking, especially the Zywiec, but I don't understand Polish.)

But no, it's all true, and helpfully summarised on the Moulton Buzz blog. Alfred Pennyworth - Real Cyclist, trouser clips and all - therefore joins Peter Gabriel in the celebrity-Moulton A-list.

Why American popular cinema always makes its villains and butlers English I'm not quite sure, but if they equate Englishness with cycling that's OK by me.

On the saddle of Solsbury Hill

The rain scuppered our cycling weekend in the Peaks. (We looked for a replacement activity which might benefit from the introduction of water. So instead we had a whisky tasting weekend in the Peaks.) Meanwhile we entertained ourselves by compiling our Top Entries for the British Songbook. (I've discussed bike-related pop songs, like Elton John's Sprocket Man, in a previous post.)

One of the suggestions was Peter Gabriel's Solsbury Hill. I was delighted to see on the YouTube video of his 2003 World Tour that he performs the song by cycling round stage on a folding bike. (I see that kimbofo, whose London cycling diary is still alive, had spotted the video before.)


It looks like a Moulton to me. That would make sense given that it comes from Gabriel's stomping ground of Wiltshire. Solsbury Hill itself is between Bath and Box, his home town. The lanes round its east side, easily accessed from the Kennet and Avon canal (on which you can cycle all the way to Reading), are lovely cycling country. When it's not cascading with rain.

Anyway, as Mr Gabriel is riding in his normal clothes, without a helmet, and is clearly enjoying the whole thing enormously, we're happy to elevate him to the status of Real Cyclist.

Saints alive! Brompton Oratory and bad cycle lanes

Cycled past the Brompton Oratory (right) this morning, the splendid Catholic church in West London which somehow gave its name to the folding bike.

There's a statue of the much-venerated figure of Cardinal Newman adorning the church, so why not of the Brompton's much-venerated designer Andrew Ritchie, patron saint* of the ingenious folding personal transport solution, who used to live just opposite in the bike's early days.

According to the church's website, the name 'Brompton Oratory' is incorrect, though that's exactly what the sign outside calls it. They maintain its correct name is the Church of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, but I wouldn't have been so keen on a bike called 'Mary'.

We'd been having an inline skating lesson with Mike van Erp, who's great fun and a brilliant teacher, and being a very active cyclist (whose bike-cam videos of bad drivers appear on YouTube) is obviously the right sort of chap. I only fell over when I laughed. Quite often, then.

We explored the back streets of posh West London on our way home. Down Ebury St (Google map below) is a contraflow cycle lane in a one-way street that's a bit like those cures that are worse than the disease.

The lane (right) forces you to ride right alongside the line of parked cars. One hastily opened door and the best you can hope for is a nice memorial at Brompton Oratory. Unless you ride out a safe distance from the parked cars, in which case you're staring down the barrel of the traffic gunning the other way.

But the lane isn't completely useless: on our visit, it was reassuring to see that the cycle lane did serve a useful purpose, as a taxi park.


View Larger Map

* Of course, the patron saint of the bicycle is in fact the Madonna del Ghisallo. I'll try to remember that next time I have a bike nicked.

Brompton bends the rules (but not on underwear)

The February/March copy of the CTC mag is now out, and has joined the stash of magazines under my bed. (Which are all about bikes, bike touring or cricket. Goodness knows what Freud would make of that.)

Inside it is my article about a trip to the Brompton factory, near Kew Bridge in west London (right top and middle). I talk to Andrew Ritchie, inventor of everyone's favourite folding bike, and to Will Butler-Adams, the energetic new chief exec, about how the company's doing.

OK, seems to be the general answer: they have full order books, a steadily increasing output (22,000 bikes a year and rising), and a nicely mixed portfolio of domestic and export (70 per cent of Bromptons go abroad, I was surprised to learn).

There's something reassuringly old-school about Mr Ritchie (bottom right). He still cycles in to the factory six miles from his house each way, in his pullover and trousers – no lycra nonsense here. He's what my mum would call nicely spoken, with a wry sense of humour and English dispassion. And while the manufacturing process today involves whizzy computer stuff, all those angles and curves on the original Brompton were worked out by the Cambridge engineering graduate on a good old-fashioned slide rule.

Indeed, it's the very slide rule in this picture here. As far as I know, this is the first time the fact has been revealed, or a photo of the item published. (See larger version of photo.) You'll notice there's a slight kink in it, as if in homage the famous graceful bend of the Brompton's main tube. It's not some specially curved instrument for tackling sophisticated hyperbolic functions; Mr Ritchie just left it too close to the fire one day.

Two other features in the mag caught my eye. Following on from yesterday's post, there's an interview with Magnatom, a 'helmet cam vigilante' cyclist in Glasgow who posts up YouTube videos of dangerous drivers, and has received death threats for his activities.

And, in the fascinating diaries of a 1930s cycle tourist travelling light in Yugoslavia and Albania, we learn that 'such luxuries as pyjamas and underwear are soon dispensed with after a little practice'.

I did once travel super-light, with a Brompton and a daypack round Japan. But I definitely did not dispense with underwear.