Cyclogeography (12 page)

On the morning of the second day I was woken by sunrise coming over the tops of the trees. I pedalled on
through the frigid air, stopping for coffee in Rushdon, erecting further signs as I went, in Peterborough and Ely, and then turned south for Cambridge.

Long was a better rider, fitter than me perhaps, or more dedicated to his journey, un-weighed down by tent and sleeping bag. He was freer, too, unburdened by the desire to recreate a journey, he simply had to make one. He pushed on through the night, sleeping only when fatigue struck. My ride was more domestic, and on the second night I sought out a bed in Pampisford, on the outskirts of Cambridge. It was an appropriate staging post. Before we left Cambridge my host, a Fellow of Jesus College, showed me one of Long’s other works in the senior common room. It was a mural of muddy hand-prints spread in a circle, a mandala, hypnotically uniform apart from the slight variations in the splash at the fingertips. He told me that someone had once wiped away two of the muddy fingerprints from the light switch in the corner of the room. When the Fellows wrote to Long and asked him what to do he sent them a phial of Avon mud, sanctified by the artist, and instructed them to recreate it with their own hands.

We left Cambridge along the ‘DNA trail’, a bike path made up of 10,257 coloured tiles mapping out the nucleotides of the BRCA2 gene. The gene is responsible for susceptibility to breast cancer, and was discovered at the nearby Sanger Institute. The route felt like another, grimmer kind of mapping – the mapping
of the fragile body. We picked our way through the technolands which surround the city, an idyll of the suburban planner’s pen. The sun blazed. The country was full of signs telling you what not to do: ‘No cold calling’; ‘Countrywatch’; ‘Say no to the Wind Farm’.

I slept well and left Pampisford at dawn. Damsons and blackberries flicked by in the hedgerows. Birds I didn’t know the names of sang in the fields. I arrived back in London in the afternoon. The pull of the city was strong. Following the River Lea I passed a big bus depot and a taxi rank, serving the city from its satellite towns. I sat by the river and watched the fronds moving in the stream. A sparrow hawk broke in front of me. I passed canal boats and barges, watched over by the huge warehouses, workshops, gasometers and pylons, and sheds as big as churches, ringing the M25.

I came in to London alongside Springfield marina as the storm clouds were gathering over Hackney Marshes. The wind showered conkers, scattered leaves from the trees, signalling the end of summer. I cycled past the mothballed velodrome in the Olympic park, past narrowboats on the river. I placed my last sign on the side of a path under a great willow tree before I rode back in to the city. My ring of signs, I hoped, was still intact.

W
hen winter arrives the work of the cycle courier becomes much less rewarding, despite the fact that you earn a bit more money. The fair-weather riders who swell the ranks in the summer and compete for jobs, squeezing earnings, fall away by late autumn. Standing by becomes a torture. You pray for work, not just so that you earn money but so that you can keep warm. Your toes freeze. Your joints seize up. When it rains the rain mixes with dirt and grime and wicks its way across your body. The fine London dust, a lethal composite of heavy metals, uncracked hydrocarbons and other killer particles, seeps into your pores and stains your bathwater grey. By the end of a working day you wear the city. Grit-bearded and fume-lunged, your fingers are covered in dark tarmacadam shadows. The roads empty of other cyclists. Bicycles are pickled in the salt and the grit.

In
In Pursuit of Spring,
an account of a bicycle ride he made from London to the Quantock Hills, the poet
Edward Thomas claimed that ‘many days in London have no weather. We are aware only that it is hot or cold, dry or wet; that we are in or out of doors; that we are at ease or not.’ But after three years on the road I knew this not to be true. During the winter I had come to attend to the weather every morning as carefully as a sailor about to put to sea.

After a while on the circuit some couriers get itchy feet. They want travel, to get away from it all. They want to cycle around the world, or to race, or to go and ride L’Étape du Tour, the amateur event in which non-professionals are allowed to ride a stage of the Tour de France on closed roads. I had more modest ambitions. They say you can only really consider yourself a proper courier after you’ve worked for three winters. It was my third winter on the circuit, my third year of shuffling packages around the indifferent city. I was growing weary of it. I had begun to think of the future. Couriering had provided a good stopgap in between studying for various degrees. They had racked up along with the miles ridden – BA, MA, PhD – but I had reached the end of that particular treadmill too. My girlfriend had found out she was pregnant, and I wasn’t sure cycle couriering was the best way to support this new life. It was time to move on.

In 1913, one hundred years earlier, Thomas had felt similarly stifled by the city.
In Pursuit of Spring
begins as an urban journey. It is written from the perspective of what he called ‘Clapham Junction Man’, a
figure embodying many of his own anxieties about the corrupting forces of urban life. ‘In the streets, for the present,’ Thomas wrote:

If Long’s ride was an exploration, Thomas’s was an escape, taking him away from London and towards the villages of an England he felt was being lost forever. It was a to be a ride through ‘Nether Stowey, Kilver, Crowcombe, and West Bagborough, to the high point where the Taunton-Bridgwater road tops the hills and shows all Exmoor behind, all the Mendips before, and upon the left the sea, and Wales very far off.’ It was a journey made ‘on or with a bicycle’, Thomas wrote, and ‘the season was Easter, a March Easter’. For Thomas the journey represented a way of leaving it all behind – leaving the stresses of the hack journalism by which he made his living and escaping from the anonymous masses of the city.
In Pursuit of Spring
was to be his last prose work.

Thomas’s litany of unfamiliar names was too attractive to ignore. Like him, I wanted to leave London behind again, to go on a longer journey than Long’s ride. I wanted to seek Spring on the road. The centenary coincidence was tempting. And so on Good
Friday, one hundred years after him – and during the coldest March for fifty years – I set off by bicycle in pursuit of Thomas, to ride the roads he’d ridden along and see what of the route had changed, and what had remained the same.

Thomas’s journey was part of a trend, born of the growing affordability of bicycles at the turn of the twentieth century, of going on cycling tours in order to discover the countryside on your own terms. In 1924 the journalist and keen cyclist C. E. Montague had set off on a similar journey, a twenty-four hour bicycle ride from Manchester to Charing Cross, the point from which distances to London are traditionally measured. He embarked on his journey, he wrote, in order to ‘make friends with a great trunk road.’

Truly to know a country, Montague thought (and here he was in agreement with Thomas), it was not enough to have seen it only in isolated chunks: to have glimpsed it through train windows as you were whipped along the rails, or to have encountered it slowly, at the plodding, drawn-out pace of pedestrian speed. ‘By car the thing would be easy’, he went on, ‘but then travel by car is only semi-travel, verging on the demi-semi-travel that you get in trains.’ To truly know a road, Montague continued, you must feel it ‘with your muscles, as well as see it, before even your eyes can get a full sense of it.’

The new velocities provided by car and train travel that Montague was reacting against had bent the world around themselves, influencing the way it looked as well as what it felt like. The tyranny of cars meant that roads would increasingly be built straight and wide. As cars came to dominate, advertisers had to simplify their designs so that posters could be read from vehicles travelling at previously unimagined speeds. And as travel became ever quicker and cheaper, anxieties set in over how the new ways of travelling were isolating people from the places they inhabited.

Different modes of transport have their own rhythms and their own vernacular. Driving isolates, cocooning you in the car’s aluminium embrace and throwing up vistas on the windshield as though they were projections on a screen. Train-travel frames the world and smoothes out its idiosyncrasies. Rails cut through the landscape on the paths of least resistance, both economic and geological, divorcing travellers from topography as they’re rushed along the tracks. Underground, on the tube, commuters are removed from the landscape still further. Differences in journeys registered only in the acoustic signatures of the lines – their particular hums and rattles – and the time they take to complete.

Montague’s journey, like Thomas’s, was a way of reclaiming speed. For him cycling was the perfect compromise between the tyranny of the automobile and the slowness of walking. The bike allowed him to
feel the grain of a landscape whilst still providing an efficient means of travelling through it. It gave Montague a new and intimate way of experiencing his own country, the warp and weft of the land, the texture of roads, the intimate geography of an England he felt was changing forever.

Montague’s and Thomas’s journeys were also quests for a sense of national identity. Britain never had as strong a bicycle road racing tradition as did Continental Europe, but in the early twentieth century the bicycle still contributed to conceptions of nationhood. The journey across the South Downs undertaken by the draper’s assistant Hoopdriver in H. G. Wells’s novel
The Wheels of Chance,
in which he encounters flirtatious women and angry vicars, is typical of the narratives of the mass-mobilisation of the cycling middle classes that were popular before the First World War. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, freed by their bikes, clerks and shop assistants could finally leave the city under their own steam and return home within a day. Cycling clubs proliferated, offering their members the chance to go ‘rambling on wheels’ and connect with the land in a way they had previously been unable to.

Almost as soon as it was invented the bicycle was enthusiastically endorsed as a means of teaching people the contours of their own country. ‘The countryside was obviously a real geographical space before bicyclists travelled to it in the 1890s,’ writes the cycling
historian Zack Furness, but it ‘was also produced by the act of cycling.’ As a newspaper report from the time had it:

Cycling, like walking, can be a subversive act. Unlike walking, however, it depends on infrastructure – on the network of macadamised roads which spidered out over the country in the nineteenth century, coming into being alongside the rise of the
flâneur
. After the railways began to dominate travel it was thought that roads would become redundant; that they’d whither away through want of use, and that in the future both freight and people would be carried exclusively by rail, and a decade or so before Thomas embarked on his ride, the bicycle had yet to make its mark as a machine for touring, stymied by the bad roads and green lanes of the countryside.

However, in 1901 Edgar Hooley, a surveyor for Nottinghamshire County, was out walking in Derbyshire
when he came upon a stretch of road smoother than any he’d seen before. He asked the locals how they’d achieved such a good surface and they told him it was an accident: a barrel of tar had spilt on the road and, in an attempt to soak it up, they had poured on slag from the local coal mine. Hooley stole the idea and patented his tarmac process later that year, and the first tarmacadam roads in England were built in 1902.

The new roads were quickly seized upon by cyclists. In Hilaire Belloc’s
The Stane Street
, in many ways a companion volume to
In Pursuit of Spring
and published in the same year, Belloc (who rode a high-Wheeler and was for a time cycling correspondent for the
Pall Mall Gazette
) wrote about the ‘deep time’ implicit in the road network that was being challenged by the metalling of the nation’s roads. England’s road system, he wrote:

England’s highways offered a rebuke to the delirious and rigorously planned grid-systems of the new world, laid out in cities like New York. For Belloc they represented the memory of a race. The old trade routes corresponded with a sense of identity that, Belloc felt, was being quickly eroded.

By 1922, most London roads were surfaced with wood, first used to dampen down the noise of passing traffic outside hospitals, later used as the surface of choice across the network. The favoured wood was Jarra, a dense hardwood prized for its hardwearing qualities. It was imported from Australia and soaked in kerosene to make it tougher, but the process made it prone to catching fire. After floods or heavy rainfall it would often warp and bend, destroying the road surface. Roads in the suburbs, on the other hand, were generally still made of crushed stone and dirt.

Certain kinds of roads, the kind Thomas loved best, wear their monumental wear on their surfaces, registering the passing of time in their shape, their depth, their very names. In the countryside Holloways, formed by the tramping of thousands of feet – both human and animal – have been formed by travel in quite direct ways. Robert Macfarlane argues that such records of travel can be ‘humbling, for they are landmarks that speak of habit rather than suddenness. Trodden by innumerable feet, cut by innumerable wheels, they are the records of journeys made to market, to worship, to sea.’

I’d found that such stark reminders of travel were rare in London, whose roads are never more than a few months old, left crisscrossed with the scars of numerous face-lifts. In the city asphalt is shed annually, like the skin of a snake: scraped off with flailing chains before being spat out into waiting trucks and laid anew
by machines which resemble urban combine harvesters. Asphalt suffers from an amnesia unknown to mud and stone. ‘Deserted roads’, as Thomas Hardy wrote, ‘bespeak a tomb-like stillness more emphatic than that of glades and pools.’ Roads were memorials, I realised as I rode around London. Empty roads are a theatre stage waiting to be animated. And yet despite their cyclical renewal, many roads possess a simple identity borne of their shape, an identity that can only be discovered by finding out what it feels like to ride them. In this my recreation of Thomas’s ride felt like a way of recreating a memory. His book was one record of the journey, the official record, but in recreating it I thought I might understand something about his writing too. I hoped that, out on the road, I might discover its source.

Though many of the roads Thomas took are now unfriendly to cyclists, I wanted to follow his route as closely as possible, and so I set off on my own journey from his house on Shelgate Road in Clapham. To find Spring he first had to struggle through the newly-built suburbs of London. ‘The suburban by-streets already looked rideable’, he noted on the first day of his ride, ‘but they were false prophets […] the surface between the west end of Nightingale Lane and the top of Burntwood Lane was fit only for fancy cycling.’

For Thomas roads were entities, monuments
to travel. According to de Selby, the scientist savant whose presence haunts, via footnotes, Flann O’Brien’s
The Third Policeman
, roads are ‘the most ancient of human monuments, surpassing by many tens of centuries the oldest thing of stone that man has reared to mark his passing. The tread of time […] levelling all else, has beaten only to a more enduring hardness the pathways that have been made throughout the world.’ Cyclists recognise the monumentality of roads better than most. For drivers the road is merely, as Iain Sinclair writes, a ‘dull silvertop that acts as a prophylactic between driver and landscape’, but over time cyclists develop an asphalt consciousness drawn from years of minute observation conducted from the saddle. In his 1885 treatise ‘Physiologie de l’asphalte’, Alexis Martin described the way in which asphalt, then a relatively new element in urban life, was beginning to be read in various ways by city dwellers. ‘The manufacturer passes over the asphalt conscious of its quality,’ he wrote: