A draw for cyclists: Poster exhibition at LT museum

There's an nice exhibition of illustrations promoting cycling in London at the Transport Museum in Covent Garden until 22 August. (The museum is ten quid to get in, with children free, so this exhibition could be the excuse you need to go.)

It shows the best entries from a competition run with the Association of Illustrators. As always with these things, much of the fun comes from disagreeing with the judges' decisions, because the ones you like are clearly much better.


Many of the entries go for the kaleidoscopic, with a bold collage of cycling-is-eco-fun images. Galia Bernstein's Go Green, for example (right), the image used to publicise the exhibition; although curiously it doesn't contain any green.

Ms Bernstein may be making a point, or perhaps she just liked the Barclayesque, turquoise feeling to the city milieu.


Mia Nilsson's third-prize entry (right) goes for a similar approach, perhaps inspired by the trunk-route and branch-line network of the Cycle Superhighways. Or perhaps not.


The first prize went to Rachel Lillie's Good for you Green for London (right), though there were several others that caught my eye.

I was rather taken with the 1960s-kids'-book humour of Mithila Shafiq's Going to Horse Guard Parade [sic], with a soldier giving his horse a lift on a tandem; like the London Bike Hire Scheme, I'm not sure that the promotion of equestrian bike-sharing will significantly increase the capital's modal share of cycle journeys, but it makes me happy.

I liked the sideways humour of Marco Viale's Bikali, with the eight-armed Indian deity astride a bike. Yes, you often need eight arms in London: two to hold the handlebars, two to signal, two to hold the coffee and bacon roll, and two for gesticulating to drivers.


The illustration I'd most want on my bedroom wall is Charis Tsang's Taking in the View (detail, below right), a skyline panorama from Primrose Hill in sunny, relaxing 1930s poster style that promotes the space and freedom of cycling through subtlety rather than thumping a biodegradable tub.

The funniest one is Jamie Wieck's The Joy of Cycling, a risqué parody of the 1970s book The Joy of Sex. Typefaces and line drawings are authentic, even down to that bloke's period thicket of a beard, and the bike puns are almost laugh-out-loud. (I'll even celebrate his comedically straight-faced instructions to you to 'always use protection' and 'practise safe cycling' and wear a helmet.)

Plenty to enjoy, and they've got a Hire Bike on display too. For those going there by the real thing, there's a docking station right outside the south exit on Tavistock St, and another in Wellington St, possibly forming London's closest pair.

And hooray for the Museum: the find-us section on their website prominently features directions on how to get there by bike.

For all you cycling trombonists on ice

The most intriguing musical instruments in any London museum are the collection of keyed trombones (right) in the Horniman Museum. The excellent and child-friendly collection of world stuff, music stuff, and stuffed animal stuff, is just yon side of Dulwich in the south of the city.


Intriguing because, as the card (right) informs you, 'Specially shaped valve trombones were designed to be played at times when moving a slide was difficult, such as while marching, riding, cycling or playing in orchestra pits'.

Music for a cycling trombonist? Guaranteed cult status awaits any young composer.


If you're inspired to cycle there, the museum has decent onsite Sheffield stands.

The area also offers some sweeping, and surprisingly elevated, views of the city skyline. Not just from the museum gardens (right, which were delightfully snowed over and full of tobogganing kids over the weekend), but also from Ringmore Rise on the other side.

But if you're cycling up there in this weather, be prepared for tricky use of the slide, even without a trombone.

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...

The Tring Cycle

The Natural History Museum: London! Tring! Yes, the NHM is only half based in posh Kensington. It has another branch in Tring, Herts, 40 minutes north from Euston by train.

We went up there today, bike-and-train being the best way to go and see it from London. Because the museum itself is a couple of miles from the station - too far to walk comfortably, too tedious to do by bus, but too far from London to do by car.

And make no mistake, NHM Tring is no dusty old warehouse of provincial junk. It's got an astounding collection of stuffed mammals, birds and fish that you knew from books but which are amazing when you see them life size in front of you. There's a Scrabble-player's resource list in the bird section alone: ani, shama, coleto, trogon, motmot, piapiac, aracari, gonolek, minivet.

You can see stuffed examples of a Bengal florican, a Wonga pigeon, scaly-breasted lorikeet, Temminck's tragopan, or the splendidly named noisy pitta. The Victorian galleries deafen you with excited kids shouting and running up and down, and mums saying 'Look George, that animal comes from Kenya. We went to Kenya, didn't we?', and dads fretting 'Amber, stop that RIGHT NOW'.

It's great fun. And it has a pair of fleas in costume. And it's all free!

It's a fine day trip from London, and Tring is fun to nose around. As you'd expect from a place that sounds like a Bakelite phone, it has some handsome olde houses and cottages and picturesque back-lanes like Akeman St, the old Roman Road. Get to the town centre from the train station by the signposted roadside cycle path, and go back along the Grand Union Canal (pictures) and drop in on picture-postcard Aldbury, a village a mile east of Tring station.


We did what everyone does when exploring a new town, and consulted the windows of the local estate agents to see how much houses cost. Half a million quid, is the answer, which made us think: Wow! We could sell up in London and come to live here. If someone gave us half a million quid. Except we might be a bit bored by, say, the second day.


But if you do go to Tring, take a side-trip of an hour or so to visit one of England's few magnetic hills: a geographical optical illusion which makes a downhill road look like an uphill road, enabling you to freewheel magically uphill (right). For a few dozen metres, anyway. The physics-bending place is Dancersend Lane outside Aston Clinton just west of Tring, and there's a chapter about it in my book.