IJ spy: In Amsterdam, even the Erotic Museum involves bikes...

I've just got back from a few days in Amsterdam. Everyone cycles here of course, except stag-party Brits, so I took a bike (picture) to ensure I wasn't mistaken for one of them. It worked: the prostitutes ignored me.

Also, when I bumped into another cyclist, momentarily forgetting which side of the cycle path I should be on, he swore and threatened to kill me in Dutch. I was delighted, as I had been taken for a local.

Anyway, I took my folder, taking advantage of a five-quid Megabus each way - thus ticking two boxes much approved of by our Netherlands chums: 'bike use', and 'economy'.

It was snowy, blustery and cold, but Amsterdam's streets were still thronged with bikes. So were the pavements (picture), littered by fallen machines whose kickstands failed. Most parking is not Sheffield stands or racks, it's just a painted square of pavement where you stand and self-lock your town clunker.

The preferred luggage carrying option is the black plastic crate (picture). Wicker baskets are rare. Perhaps they've smoked them all.

Some baskets make a statement. My favourite was this beer crate (picture), though I'd have preferred Amstel, as that's the other river Amsterdam is on, apart from the IJ. Much English keg beer also celebrates a well-known river, the Piddle in Dorset.

Thanks to the amount of people on two wheels, cycling feels a normal and safe thing to do. High-visibility clothing is evidently unnecessary, and few people bother with lights. The only red lights I saw were in those prostitute booths I cycled past unacknowledged. In fact, most riders seemed to be listening to their iPod, texting, web surfing etc, with little negative impact on safety.

Many even walk their dog (picture). Some American viewers may be surprised to see that the dog is not wearing a helmet.

The bakfiets is a common way of transporting children around, such as this group in Albert Cuyp market (picture). The box is so big, it can accommodate two children, or one cheese.

Of course, I cycled gleefully round to some of the city's must-sees: cosy Jordaan cafes, snowy Vondelpark, quirky canalsides, the Rijksmuseum's Rembrandts, the Hermitage's van Goghs, the newly extended Stedelijk. Anyone who thinks the Stedelijk's art collection is a load of old rubbish is quite wrong. It's all modern.

I didn't actually go into the Erotic Museum, but I was intrigued by the blowup doll riding a bike in the foyer (picture). The sign clearly states Dutch priorities: DON'T TOUCH THE BIKE. If we want a cycling culture in the UK, this is the sort of thing we have to emulate. I can see council groups excitedly lining up factfinding trips now.

Freewheeling uphill: Scotland's Electric Brae

Cycling in Scotland the other day I took the chance to do some uphill freewheeling near Ayr.

Croy Brae, often nicknamed Electric Brae, is a 'gravity hill' - an optical illusion that fools you into thinking an up slope is a down slope, and that the laws of thermodynamics are being temporarily suspended.

It's on the A719, about seven miles of gentle climb and coastal views south out of Ayr. A sign warns you of slow traffic: lots of cars can't resist the temptation to stop, let off the handbrake, and roll magically against the gradient.


There are several such gravity hills (I featured one in Aston Clinton, near Tring, in my Quirky Bike Rides book). But Electric Brae is the best one to cycle.



The illusion really is astonishing. This stretch of road clearly goes downhill into the trees, doesn't it?

Actually not, as the detailed stone plaque informs you in the lay by. In fact it's a quarter of a mile of 1 in 86 descent the other way, towards the camera.

If you stop on your bike 'down' in the middle of those trees and face towards the camera, you roll 'uphill', reaching a freewheel speed of about 10mph. (Conversely, of course, cycling the other way feels oddly strenuous for a 'downhill'.)


The strangest thing is how the illusion disappears the instant you lower your viewpoint (right), particularly when you're looking through a camera. With the surrounding hills out of your eye line, it's suddenly clear that the slope runs towards you. It's a remarkable demonstration of how subtle, but powerful, the subconscious effect is of the skyline on your mental spirit level.

Model cycling facilities at Wimborne

Cycling in Dorset the other day I popped in to Wimborne's Model Town.

This is one of those 'world famous' attractions that has the term 'world famous' in quotes, which means you'd vaguely heard of it from an uncle when you were little, or from that primary school teacher from Poole you failed to chat up once.

The Model Town, opened in 1951, is a charming one-tenth size reconstruction of Wimborne as it was then, shops, houses, minster and all. You stride around the traffic-free streets, sixty feet tall, like a benign B-movie monster in search of a cycle shop.



There are two, both with miniature (but rather modern-looking MTB-style) bikes in their windows.

Crawford's (tel. 347) looks the place to buy a decent new bike for a few guineas, while Dacombe's (tel. 452) seems the place for repairs and advice, or buying an inner tube for a 2.7 inch wheel.


Not much sign of bike parking in 1940s Wimborne by the looks of it, though.

Afterwards you can cycle round the full-size modern-day town, to see if the shops are still there (they're not). It's a pleasant enough place, but when you get cut up by a white van you wish you were sixty feet tall again.

Let's twist again: Britain's bendiest road

One of Britain's strangest roads is in Rothesay, on the Isle of Bute off the west coast of Scotland.

The Serpentine Road was built when the town boomed as a Victorian resort, its ten hairpins enabling the horses to carry building materials up to the manor house on top of the hill. Or so the bloke in the pub down the bottom told us, anyway.

A curious biking experience either up or down, it's much more exciting than the much-vaunted 'crookedest street in the world' Lombard St in San Francisco. It's twistier, and it's two way, plus you don't have all the gawping tourists.


London's twistiest bike path is on the Ornamental Canal just west of St Katharine's Dock by Tower Bridge, while the twistiest road in England is said to be Zig Zag Hill, part of the B3081.

But neither offers what Rothesay (right) offers, which is superb Victorian architecture, a restored Victorian public toilet in posh marble, stunning views, and a fish and chip shop owned by relatives of Lena Zavaroni. Ha! Take that, San Francisco!

Google's Street View vehicle heroically ascended the road, and on one of the views you can see a cyclist pushing wearily upstairs.

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Plus ça change: Bikes through the ages at Rapha

Even if you're a real cyclist who considers the Tour de France a good ride spoiled, we recommend nipping into the Rapha cafe, the über-stylish racers' pop-up in Clerkenwell that we've blogged about before, this week.

While the Tour is on - this week, then - they have a fabulous exhibition downstairs of racing bikes for every decade through the 20th century. (It's actually in celebration of the 'centenary of the Col du Tourmalet', an age geologists might dispute.)

The remarkable thing is, of course, how little bikes have changed since 1900. The single front brake on the century-old model is pretty rudimentary, but otherwise with a respray it could be a trendy single-speed next to you in today's ASL, Brooks saddle and all.


As the decades roll on, gearing technology develops from alarmingly crude levers on the rear seatstays, but otherwise the most noticeable change is the choking algal growth of sponsors' logos.

And the handlebars of this bike - from the 1910s - show the cutting-edge technology used by the club racer of the post-Edwardian years.

Charity begins everywhere

A mass bike tour round the coastline of Britain starts today. The Great Tour will take a band of cyclists 'drawn from sport, celebrity, charity, politics, science and the arts' 6600km (4100 miles) in 64 days, starting and finishing in Seaton, in Devon. The organisers say it'll be the first of an annual event.

Coastline rides seem to be a thing of the moment. Nearing the end of his coast ride is Simon Curtis, who since 14 March has been dropping in every onshore lighthouse en route.

Inevitably, both are for charity. Now, charity is great, and I've done bike rides for charity myself (eight hundred quid for asthma research when I did an End to End, and eight thousand for cancer research round Europe). Many of my best friends have done bike rides for charity and I've been happy to support their causes. I've also done several more not for charity, just for fun, as have many of my best friends.

But it does feel now like every bike tour has to be for charity. These days you can't nip out to on your bike to get some fish and chips without being expected to raise awareness for heart disease.

We need a complementary wave of bike tours for people who don't have any more mental energy or money for good causes. I'm going to start with a bike tour of Greenwich today, visiting all the cafes and cake shops en route. raising obliviousness about obesity. And awareness that you're allowed to bike tour just for fun.

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

Unlicensed premises: Quirky reasons for a bike tour

Lawrence Dallaglio's 'Cycle Slam' ride will arrive in England sometime today, and at Twickenham sometime tomorrow. It's a charity ride from Rome to Edinburgh, taking in all the Six Nations rugby stadiums. (Dallaglio, right, used to captain England. You can follow the ride's progress on its website's nifty live tracker.)

And for the Paris to London leg he's being joined by several of my chums from the Greene King brewery of Bury St Edmunds, which he helps to promote. I know this thanks to GK's generous sponsorship of the London Bloggers Meetup last week, a fine monthly institution where you can meet other bloggers face to face and have a lot of free drinks. If you write a blog, I heartily recommend it.

What caught my eye about Dallaglio's ride is not the charity aspect, but the premise. Cycle touring is one of the three things that make life worth living, though I've forgotten what the other two used to be.

And for me, the perfect cycle tour has some sort of semi-arbitrary premise. Because the best things from a tour come from the getting there: the unpredictable encounters and spontaneous experiences en route. But without the end, you never get the means.

And Doing All Six Nations Stadiums seems a fine excuse for a long bike ride to me, though I'd've taken about five times as long to enjoy it properly.

But here's some more, genuine, cycle-tour wheezes I've done or heard about. It's the premise, you see, that turns a Cycling Tour into a Real Cycling Tour.


Land's End to John O'Groats Of course lots of people do this. But better with a theme. When I did it I had only local food en route: fish in Padstow, cheddar in Cheddar, pork pies in Melton Mowbray, stotties in Newcastle etc. I met other End to Enders who linked cathedral cities; or who stayed, ate and drank only at pubs called the Red Lion.

Britain side to side There are lots of coast-to-coast routes now (Sea to Sea, Reivers, Hadrian's Wall etc). But one I particularly like is the sonorous and alphabetically satisfying Barmouth to Yarmouth. Some people even take in Charmouth.

Ordnance Survey Grid References If you have the right initials and birthdate, you can convert yourself into an Ordnance Survey grid reference: two initials, ddmmyy. If you're called Steve Jones and were born on 24 March 1944 for instance, you're SJ240344, which is a spot in Wales north-west of Oswestry. Two of my mates celebrated their 40th birthdays by cycling between their grid references, which happened to be from Cadair Idris to somewhere in Cornwall. (Grid references actually exist for all initials from AA to ZZ in theory, but most of them are in the sea off Iceland or somewhere else the OS doesn't cover, like Lithuania.)

Twin Towns I once cycled to all the twin towns of Bath. (And also visited all the places called Bath in the world. That earned me an appearance on Blue Peter in 2001. I got a Blue Peter badge for that, which entitles me to free admission to the Chessington World of Adventures. If accompanied by a responsible adult.)

A to B One chap cycled from A, in Norway, to Bee, in Nebraska. A splendidly pointless point-to-point.

The Old Iron Curtain Fascinating trip some guy did last year along the old border. The pre-1989 Road Atlas of Europe used to scare me. All of civilised Europe was full of towns and roads and green bits to denote forests and mountains, but beyond the iron curtain it was a vast featureless expanse of white, with just a few straggly roads and grim towns like Minsk and Gdansk. Then the wall came down and you could cycle there, and you found it wasn't all white, in fact it looked rather like where you'd just been only a bit shabbier and with much cheaper beer and quite nice people.

Scottish Football Grounds In preparation. A journey of discovery, trying to find 'places' such as Raith or St Mirren.

Alphabet Soup Another plan in progress. A 26-day cycle trip that involves staying at a place beginning with each letter of the alphabet in succession. X could be a problem.

Today's trip Links Tesco, the Turkish grocery, East St market and a theatre in Greenwich. I'm raising money for a round tonight.

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.

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.