The Last London

by Iain Sinclair

  In England, before the great New Labour push, the bicycle belonged to treasured eccentrics: Oxbridge academics, metal-scavengers festooned in electrical cables, youth hostellers with chapped knees and laminated maps. Cycling was an existential Iris Murdoch novel: no padlocks required, no helmets. A becoming flush to the cheeks between afternoon assignations. Murdoch batted around Oxford, head full of Sartre, gown flying. There is a bicycle silhouette by Charles Mozley on the dustjacket of The Sandcastle (1957). English schoolmasters, in the woodsmoke twilight, disappointed and damply lustful, trundle over weeded gravel to reach ‘the smooth tarmac of the arterial road’.

  Wicker basket. Tweed jacket. Corduroy. Camden Town, in Sickertian gloom, to Regent’s Park: the national treasure Alan Bennett writing television plays about members of a cycling club soon to be obliterated in the First War. Poets cycling by default (they are lethal in cars). Philip Larkin, the Eeyore of English verse, pushing his hefty machine through a Hull graveyard, white raincoat and bicycle clips, misted spectacles, for a John Betjeman documentary.

  The surrealist poet David Gascoyne, after years of silence, came to Cambridge for a poetry festival in 1975. He was knocked down by a cyclist and appeared on stage with his arm in a plaster cast.

  The only photograph of the mandarin poet JH Prynne, who operated privately, even hermetically, and as far from Larkin as could be imagined, was made public when a broadsheet responded to large claims from Randall Swingler in The Last of England (2004). Prynne, in black jacket, orange tie, had his image stolen as he rode through Cambridge on his bicycle. Soon afterwards he began to make extended visits to China. And it is clear now, reading a transcript of an interview with Jeff Dolven and Joshua Kotin for The Paris Review that the poet would have been happier in the old bicycle China of Mao than among the choked avenues of imported cars. ‘They’ve become a capitalist country with reckless commercialism, which has replaced any sort of ideological purpose that gave direction to their social aspirations,’ he said.

  By 2000, thanks to neo-liberal political initiatives, the marginal status of cycling was revised and upgraded. London was a gridlocked mess with every journey coming to a standstill in contemplation of the horror of the Blackwall Tunnel. White-van traffic seethed and texted. Underground trains panted (when they operated at all) in hot tunnels. Buses lurched in convoys. It was time to take stock of Lord Tebbit’s advice and jump on our bikes. After the bombs in July 2005, towpaths alongside the canal became cycle tracks. The overnight shift in the cycling demographic was spectacular. Public transport was left to the disadvantaged: economic migrants and bendy-bus freeloaders. You could categorise the new tribe of urban cyclists as belonging to three dominant classes: pod, posse and peloton.

  The peloton stamped, wheel to wheel, without compassion or respect for regulations, between Stoke Newington and Shoreditch, Clerkenwell and Mile End, Docklands and the City. They ventured to Portland Place, White City (before the Westfield supermall), and Goldsmiths College in New Cross. They were waiting to take over London with cycling superhighways.

  Coffee outlets, which double as bicycle repair shops, have mushroomed along towpaths and the railway fringes of London Fields to cater to this tendency. At Lock 7, over the bridge from Broadway Market, the hook was: ‘Love Cycles, Love Food’. No-nonsense women rip rubber and mend punctures, while clients sip barista coffee at monkish tables. The peloton gathers here to exchange information before heading off down the canal. Their hard-shell helmets are ribbed like condoms. Like exposed, acid-stripped brain stems. GoPro cameras on. Red eyes blinking at first light. The peloton is a many-wheeled centipede hogging a path no wider than a single, sleeping nun.

  The posse, who bossed it here before the eco-classes took to the saddle, ride the wide pavements of Queensbridge Road and Hackney Road: hooded, no hands, coming out of nowhere. Like the account Thomas Berger gives, in Little Big Man (1964), of the Pawnee appearing over a bluff to a westward-rolling wagon train. Our postcode posse, back in pre-Olympic days, favoured thick-wheeled mountain bikes. Right now, the guerrilla raiders of outlying regions operate as irregular BMX units, called together by phone, cruising kebab joints and isolated bus halts.

  Zdenek Makar, an office-worker from the Czech Republic, after a precedence dispute in the queue at a Perfect Fried Chicken outlet on East Indian Dock Road, was chased by a gang of youths on mountain bikes. He was felled and beaten with a metal chain. A passing civilian cyclist, who found the victim lying ‘in a pool of blood’, near All Saints DLR station at Poplar, attempted cardio-pulmonary resuscitation. At 12.20am, paramedics pronounced Mr Makar dead.

  In Hackney, scouts patrol their twilight turf, reporting likely prospects on stolen phones. They do not use towpaths or sanctioned cycle tracks. They do not acknowledge the peloton. Or pedestrians. Unless they are carrying interesting packages or chattering, oblivious, on devices that are begging to be recycled.

  Warriors cut straight across the busy boulevards. They know all the secret ways through estates. If by some accident they find themselves on a main road, they hold the centre of it, with Samurai swagger, oblivious of frustrated utility vans and honking builders. When the posse meet, they circle and weave in elegant figures, so slowly that it seems impossible for them to stay upright. The essence of their style is never to break sweat, never to acknowledge other road users (except as prey). And never to sound, or even possess, a bell. You don’t have to like them, but it’s hard not to admire their Apache appropriation of territory. They are seeding an inevitable expulsion, soliciting retribution.

  A skunky contrail of indestructible fastfood cartons and crumpled cans of synapse-abusing energy drinks boasts of their passage. The posse are never seen to park or padlock bicycles. Sometimes they double up, as if one of the horses had been shot out from under them by John Wayne or Jimmy Stewart.You see a wobbling pair coming back to the reservation on a stolen Santander steed, a lumpy Boris bike.

  Hackney Council funded bus-stop advertisements to warn the unwary: KEEP YOUR PHONE SAFE. BE AWARE OF YOUR SURROUNDINGS. But that is asking the impossible. Cell-phones cancel surroundings in their addiction to a false intimacy; the illusion of travelling inside a shroud of protection while chattering to some unseen other. Until the swooping posse introduce these digital addicts to the reality of the street.

  A more recent discrimination is the pod: Cameron’s kinder, the babes of Boris. They lodge in the new territories – Hoxton, Shoreditch, London Fields – so that they can roll from bed and get to work, in the splash-zone around Silicon Roundabout, Old Street, in five or ten minutes. Barney Rowntree, a radio producer, explained how it goes.

  ‘We live on bikes, all my friends. So we can regulate time. We know exactly how long it takes to move between clubs, pubs, wherever we’re going to meet.’

  These cycles, for security, are chained together in a nest, a metal pod from which it is impossible to extract a single separate machine. Members use two sets of locks. Kryptonite devices cost from £75 to £100. The individual machines are slender, weighing less than the bondage chains required to protect them. Members of the pod approve of the Boris bike scheme: as back up, when their own fixed-gear bicycles are stolen. The limited terrain available to Barclays Cycle Hire members doesn’t bother them. They don’t deal in suburbs. More and more now, the edges are melting, collapsing into human landfill. Nobody out there can afford a statement bike. Clerkenwell, Soho, the mainline stations, that covers it. The only certainties in being a paid-up Silicon Roundabout regular are: theft and road accidents. Every podist I questioned admitted that they would have a bike stolen once or twice a year – and suffer a bone-crushing shunt of some kind within three years. They were such cheerful fatalists. I liked them very much, in their difference.

  Ben Judah, in This is London: Life and Death in the World City (2016), discovers that the young people of the severed railway suburbs aspire to come in, to join the pod. ‘The sexually frustrated children of Neasden want to be close to Shoreditch not the M40 to the Cotswol
ds. They want to be central, they want to cycle – they want the city.’

  Rowntree’s most recent loss came when his professionally manacled machine was sawn in half. The noise of a bolt-cutter, whipped out from beneath a long coat, snapping through kryptonite, is like a gunshot.

  And his latest accident? A broken shoulder bone, courtesy of an unmarked pothole. Most tumbles are caused by the state of London roads, or the intoxication (booze, dope, fumes) of cyclists who believe that drink-driving laws don’t apply to Big Society pedlars, princes of the City.

  They are confused, encouraged with slogans – CLICK YOUR WAY TO IMPROVED WELLBEING, LOOKING OUT FOR VULNERABLE ROAD USERS, NUMBER OF GOLDSMITHS ROW CYCLISTS TODAY: 1,713 – and inhibited by fearsome headlines. DEAD CYCLIST IS ITALIAN PRINCE. LONDON CYCLE RACE DEATH. DEATH OF CYCLIST LEAVES FAMILY DESTROYED. CYCLIST CRUSHED OUTSIDE LUXURY DEPARTMENT STORE. FATHER-OF-THREE THIRD LONDON CYCLIST TO DIE IN A MONTH.

  The elite of pod world – or so they consider – are the cycle couriers. I asked Matt Sherratt, an artist and former courier, how he survived.‘Forty is the watershed. When you’re young, you are pretty sharp-witted. On a fixed-wheel bike you are part of the experience, you dart through the traffic. If there’s a whole row of traffic, you’re not going to stay in that row. You get out to the opposite side of the road. You will absolutely rip down the other side, the wrong way. You’ve got clear visibility, it’s perfectly safe. It’s safer to just jump the lights. You create an open space. You own it.’

  Being a courier for someone like Metro, the photographic agency, gives you credibility and uniform: ‘beautifully branded kit’. You are special, one of the cadre. A Spitfire pilot in petrol heaven. Special status, special accidents. In Australia, Matt went straight into the back of a station wagon at a zebra crossing, head first through the rear windscreen. He made it back to London, where he hit a pothole and detoured to hospital with a rack of broken ribs.

  The older, cannier Jock McFadyen agreed: ‘I never wear a helmet. I ride on the pavement. I never go on the road, except out of frustration. And I always go through red lights, always. And never sound a bell. Traffic lights don’t have the intelligence to say there are no pedestrians. You do have confrontations with drivers. I’ve had to punch mirrors off.’

  What Jock likes most about the bicycle is the simplicity of design. ‘You can build a bike from scratch in an hour.’ He owns forty-five of them. Most of his shunts, he acknowledges, have been his own fault. A late return from a gallery opening up west: Old Street, pissed as a brewery rat, sudden application of front brakes. And he’s lying spreadeagled across the bonnet of a shocked motorist, licking the paint job. Jock approves the Boris bike scheme, without knowing too much about it, but appreciating, with his painterly eye, the blue Barclays logo on the silver ranks of docking stations in dull places.

  Nobody told me that it was easier to dock a lunar transfer module than a Boris bike in Shoreditch Park. There were more whitepainted ghost bikes wired to crash barriers than docking stations on Kingsland Road. These poignant installations, dressed with dead flowers, were not just a memorial to a rider crushed at the side of the road, but a memento mori for the days of the Provo white bicycles, in their hundreds, in Amsterdam: free of access, free to travel the whole city. And doomed to disappear into legend after their brief, resin-scented moment of exposure.

  ‘Sign up, hop on, ride off’: the Barclays mantra. But it was not quite as simple as that. Boris Johnson, with no false modesty, accepted credit for a light-bulb idea that had very little to do with him. Ken Livingstone had toyed with cycling initiatives and despatched indoctrinated cadres with orders to stage pit-stop clinics. ‘A female or male instructor can train you or accompany you on your usual journey.’

  In August 2007 Livingstone directed TfL (Every Journey Matters) to examine the feasibility of a cycle hire scheme. By February 2008, he was ready to copy the Vélib idea from Paris. The Lib Dems, keen to divert attention from their complacent assumption of the privileges (and the shame) of a shared administration, explained how this cycle hire business had always been their pet project, proposed by Lynne Featherstone in 2001 – and stalled, for years, by Mayor Livingstone.

  What they were stealing, in a modest way (6,000 bicycles against 20,000 for Paris), was the pet project of JC Decaux, an entrepreneur with licence to stick posters over bus stops. Decaux, who was labelled by Libération as ‘le roi du mobilier urbain’, must have felt at home plastering a city with ranks of branded docking stations. Lyons, Decaux’s home base, trialled the scheme. It proved a sound investment. Paris followed (as did Vienna, Córdoba, Brussels). And, eventually, London.

  But does it work? Sign up and you have the theoretical freedom of a choice segment of central London. The initial scheme favoured tourists tempted to explore Hyde Park and commuters coming from mainline stations. It did not favour journeys of exploration, dérives, twelve-hour projects. The first thirty minutes, once you’ve been processed and accepted, is free. A day’s outing costs £50.

  I sweated through the online application, bank details, credit checks, childhood nickname. And then, after several days, I was told that my membership was approved. By the time the key arrived, a sliver of hard plastic, I understood that I had volunteered for electronic tagging. Would this slender fob work any better than those swipe cards that refuse to let you into Premier Inn hotel rooms? Move across the city, using the key, and your presence is logged. I would be paying, by direct debit, for the privilege of trundling around the side streets of Bloomsbury as a mobile sandwich-board for a group of investment bankers.

  On foot it takes me around twenty-five minutes to reach Liverpool Street Station. It took fifteen minutes to reach the nearest Barclays’ bike. Of course, all that has changed in the new, post-Olympic, hipster Hackney. We’ve been let into London, with Overground connection and docking stations dominating Queensbridge Road and shadowing the length of the orbital railway.

  Plodding out to the cycle nest in Falkirk Street in Hoxton, I pass two ghost bikes, one a Raleigh, very much like the model Albert Finney rode in Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. It’s a mild November morning. There are 26 slots across the road from Hackney Community College: all of them empty. ‘Private Property, No Loitering.’

  I don’t loiter, I push on to the next option, Shoreditch Park. Thirty bays, two bikes. I try my key and score a red light: refused. I try the second bike, zip. I return home and ring the helpline, with which I will become very familiar in the succeeding weeks. We go through the muzak interference, the threat that our conversation will be recorded for training purposes, and then I’m informed that my key is a dud. ‘We’re registering a fault. You’ve got an invalid filter.’ A new key is promised.

  By the time it arrives, I’m away from London. An email informs me that the week for which I have signed up is over, will I renew my membership? No point in complaining that I haven’t cycled one yard. From the instant the useless key went into the slot in Shoreditch Park, red light or no red light, I was burning credit.

  Hanging around malfunctioning docking stations, I chatted to other clients. Their cheerful acceptance of the glitches in the system astonished me. Convinced that they were striking a blow for the planet, the Hackney eco-warriors in hard hats were happy to suffer local inconvenience, and to trot briskly away in quest of a rack with usable cycles. One woman, now a determined pedestrian, told me how she found herself being charged for rides she’d never made, in places she had never been. The non-return charge is £300. Barclays carry an entire department to argue over unfair deductions.

  I waited for a break in the cold weather, the optimum morning on which to revisit Hoxton. Now cycles are available, my key is accepted. I speed away towards Shoreditch Park. My plan was to test the system with a relay of short-haul journeys, always within the free half hour, anti-clockwise around a loop of docking stations, from Hoxton to Regent’s Park, Holland Park to Vauxhall, to the Tower of London. I felt like a first-year student in the open university
of urban studies.

  The first hitch was a crater obstructing the roundabout at the top of Hoxton Market. They were busy improving the image of construction again. The chasm was part of Hackney’s £22 million investment in the streets (and Volker Highways). Detour completed, my heavy bike grudged into its Shoreditch Park slot. The light showed green. I moved down the line to inspect the three available mounts. Red light, key refused: the whole station was out.

  Other Barclays’ clients were sprinting off, competitively, in all directions. Boris was certainly doing his bit for the health of Londoners by initiating a marathon relay between docking stations. And keeping amateurs off roads where they faced almost certain injury and possible death.

  Thirty-four accidents were reported for the Barclays Cycle scheme between 30th July and 30th September in 2010. A woman was knocked from her bike by one of the transporters used in the restocking process. A man was crushed against the kerb by a lorry. And a 7-year-old boy narrowly escaped injury when a docking station, butted by a car, fell on top of him. David Ellis, a photographer from Stoke Newington, was dragged under the wheels of a Barclays’ trailer. He said that the transporters constituted a serious hazard to road users, being wider than the electric vehicles that tow them.

  Marching down the canal to Danbury Street, the next station on my Barclays map, I passed one of the new caffeine refuelling facilities: Tow Path, a slot in the wall with a spread of outdoor tables. Freelance (unemployed) advertising photographers and digital wranglers, having dropped off their infants in schools and nurseries, parked their bikes for an ethical shot of brown powder from Colombia.

  ‘San Francisco, the 90s. The rumblings of a coffee culture revolution. The smell of fresh-roasted coffee in the air. Fast forward to East London, today…’