Cyclogeography (9 page)

A pair of cyclists pulled up next to me. They told me that a courier from Dublin had been hit by a car the previous night while crossing the Solec, an enormous multi-lane motorway that runs by the river alongside the race course. He’d been hit hard, his bike had been destroyed and he was in a coma in hospital.

Later that evening, under a concrete flyover, the messenger tribes of the world gathered. I bumped into friends from London who’d driven to Warsaw in one mad dash, relying on amphetamines and coffee to keep
awake. Within hours of arriving their driver had been arrested for cycling with a can of beer in his bidon holder, and the others were trying to get him bailed. They were worried that he’d been caught with pockets full of drugs, enough to land him a lengthy prison sentence in Poland. As we were just about to cycle to the police station to see if they’d let him go, he rolled up sheepishly on his bike. ‘They never checked my pockets,’ he said, ‘just put me in the back of the van. So I ate all the speed.’ He already had glassy eyes and a wild stare. He would stay awake for the rest of the week, growing increasingly confused and belligerent.

Mosquitoes swarmed in the dampness of the forest. The rain fell. No one wanted to talk about the messenger from Dublin.

On the second day we assembled under the Łazienkowski Bridge on the peninsula to watch the qualifications. A steady stream of competitors walked through race HQ, collected their manifests and set off to navigate their way round the course. Race officials tramped around making sure they obeyed the rules of the road, admonishing those who ignored the one-way systems and confiscating the bikes of riders who neglected to lock them up. Some messengers competed on foot, and did well. Others cheated, discovering unmarked tracks and secret routes through the forest. A pair of messengers raced on a tandem. I sat at a
checkpoint in the forest for a while. Occasionally messengers would emerge from the trees, ask if they were in the right place, and cycle off again.

The organiser of the race, a messenger from Amsterdam named Fish, explained to me how he had designed the race using a complicated logistical algorithm that could be applied to any course. He said that his system would revolutionise the world of competitive alleycat racing, standardising its rules and allowing objective trans-competition comparisons to be made. I cycled to another checkpoint and watched the stream of competitors slip down a muddy hill. The course was strangely quiet, far removed from the usual sounds of a working day.

In the afternoon the sun came out, and a large crowd gathered round an old car, which had been wheeled out for the wing mirror smashing competition. Competitors had to cycle alongside the car and knock off a mirror stuck on with Velcro, with points awarded for distance and style. Some tried to kick with one foot while pedalling with the other, but the most effective strategy was to use a D-lock as a bat. Eventually people got bored of the controlled destruction and the competition degenerated into a near-riot. The car was kicked to pieces and smashed up with locks before being overturned and almost ending up in the river. Someone tried to set it on fire before one of the organisers climbed on top and asked people to stop as the car was to be used as the winner’s podium. Across
the water, a pair of old men who’d been quietly fishing withdrew, and eventually the police turned up.

That evening I sat by a fire tended by a dreadlocked, moonfaced man from Budapest, who admonished people for upsetting his shopping-trolley grill. A friendly drunkard stumbled over and sat down heavily on the embers. The comforting stench of several hundred messengers drifted up on the evening air. Bored by the rain, I left the campsite a few hours later and drifted back into the city, guided by a Polish messenger who I knew from London. Halfway home he showed me a street of clubs and bars, on one side of which stood an empty, half-finished office building, dotted with clubbers taking the air. Couples sat with their legs dangling from its empty windows like figures in a doll’s house. We locked our bikes, climbed through a fence and explored the concrete skeleton of the building, before sitting down on the roof and watching the lights of the city.

On the third day, my last in Warsaw, I wandered round the racecourse on foot. No working London messengers had qualified for the main race. In the hours before it began, the most serious competitors sat studying maps of the course which they’d drawn on their arms in permanent marker. Some tinkered with their bikes, adjusting gears and brakes that had become clogged with mud. Riders who hadn’t qualified for the finals, or couldn’t be bothered to race, relaxed in a homemade
jacuzzi which the team from Lausanne had brought with them. Steam rose into air, meeting the rain half way.

During the final race I helped man a checkpoint in the winds and rain whilst bedraggled cyclists emerged from the mists and presented their soggy manifests to be stamped. Our umbrella was blown away in a gust and drifted dangerously towards the Vistula. Along the Solec, the road next to us that runs along the river, a professional peloton roared by. The Tour of Poland had come to town, conducting a five-lap circuit of Warsaw. We cheered them on:
allez! allez!
One rider had his dick in his hand and let fly a steady stream of piss as he rolled along, pushed on by his teammate. The messenger from Dublin was still in hospital. I heard no more about him.

F
or the psychogeographers the map, and knowing where you were on it, constituted a threat. Maps divorce people from the world they inhabit, encouraging them to believe that they live in a virtual, untouchable environment, and reducing the landscape to a series of easily navigable coordinates. It is a fear that has only become more general with the rise of satnav and the smartphone. Maps like these record official versions of the world, telling us where to go and how to get there, and in doing so they maintain control. For the psychogeographers, going off the map was seen as a way of reclaiming the world.

As a courier I’d found that cycling was a good way of resisting the tyranny of maps. Bikes, like water, want to flow downhill and cycling tends to uncover, almost
unconsciously, the old waterways and trade routes of a landscape. Ride a bike in London and you often find yourself following the ancient ley-lines of the city’s subterranean rivers. The pull feels curiously elemental – your bicycle becomes a dowsing rod. I discovered many of London’s lost rivers in this way – the Fleet, flowing from the ponds of Hampstead Heath to the river Thames, through Kentish Town and Camden, through Bloomsbury and Clerkenwell under Farringdon Road; the Walbrook, bisecting the City from Shoreditch to Bank; the Tyburn, which starts in Regent’s Park and trickles on through the West End, crossing Oxford Street just north of Grosvenor Square. The rivers had worn away the fabric of the city, and the bicycle made the dips and rises they left behind legible.

Along with the rivers I’d sketched out the city’s geological features. Day after day I circled the lip of the basin of the River Fleet. Day after day I climbed and descended the Pentonville escarpment. I skimmed alongside the reclaimed foreshore of the River Thames, the flattest route between City and the West End. Later I’d confirm the existence of London’s geological contours on maps, but their discovery was made by bicycle. I felt like I was engaged in a process of what the writer and suburban explorer Nick Papadimitriou calls ‘deep topography’, using the bicycle as a way of communing with the landscape’s ancient, and unmapped, past.

Open a topographical map of London, like R. W. Mylne’s
London and its Environs, Topographical and
Geological
, and you’ll see how the London basin has been formed by these secret waterways over the years. Mylne’s map is a beautiful document, an abstract mass of gradated colours and lines which follow the contours of the city itself. Pink and green streaks highlight the city’s Bagshot sands, its siliceous mounds, its loamy clays and its pebble beds. This map was for me a document of confirmation - its hachures and spot-heights corresponded to the gradients I had felt during the day’s circuits, confirming the testimony of my legs.

Mylne’s map was a by-product of the massive expansion of Victorian London that had fuelled the period’s craze for geological and archaeological exploration. Mapping London in this way was as much diagnostic as it was descriptive. ‘As much as Bazalgette and Chadwick,’ writes Eric Robinson, ‘Mylne must be associated with the major improvements to the public health of the overgrown Victorian city and conurbation in the latter part of the nineteenth century.’ Mapping the city was a way of improving London, exposing its dark secrets – its pockets of illness and poverty – and bringing them to consciousness. As tunnels were dug to house the new sewerage network, and to serve the underground trains that were burrowing themselves through the loam, so London’s geology came to the surface to be scrutinised.

Before the nineteenth century the study of London’s geology had been a speculative affair, the product of occasional boreholes dug into the surface of the
city but never consummated into a general, mappable, trend. The cuttings for the new subsurface railways and especially the road improvement works in the late nineteenth century mapped London’s past as well as its present. In Archway fossils were unearthed: plates of turtle shell and crocodile scale, seeds of the Nipa palm, sharks teeth buried in the London clay, all testifying to the city’s equatorial prehistory. Up over London, at the top of Highgate Hill, amber was uncovered. As Robinson records, ‘masses of coagulated resin of tropical trees, sometimes containing the remains of flies and insects of the same moist forests’ inspired sublime thoughts of geological deep time. In 1836, the London Clay Club was formed, and Karl Marx was ‘introduced to the wonders of the Archway Cutting’ and the inevitability of historical materialism by his friend, the geologist Roche Dakyns.

Iain Sinclair is an underground avatar for a particular kind of urban writing, a deep topography all of his own. He has been investigating London’s past and present (its overground and underground spaces) by foot from his Hackney-based home for decades, stitching narratives together as he moves around the city. The method is familiar by now. Journeys are made through landscapes and archives, conversations transcribed into notebooks and sutured into taut, endlessly fertile prose. He writes in the tradition of the visionary walker-poet
– William Blake, John Clare, W. G. Sebald – but he is interested mainly in stories about the overlooked and the forgotten. ‘I’ve always been fascinated by pests like Thomas De Quincey,’ he wrote in
American Smoke
, a book documenting a journey through America, which was also a quest for his own stylistic origins, ‘the way he hiked to the Lake District and attached himself to Wordsworth and Coleridge, before “betraying” them with gossip and mangled histories.’

Sinclair doesn’t like the term psychogeography any more but he can’t get away from it. His prose is hammered out in shoe leather. Partly it’s the kind of urban access you get on foot that he finds attractive. In
London Orbital
he described a year-long walk around the ‘acoustic footprint’ of the M25. In
Edge of The Orison
he retraced the poet John Clare’s mad walk in search of his dead wife from his asylum in Epping Forest and out through Essex. My London, which I’d grown up in and discovered through cycling, was also largely formed from reading his books.

I wanted to talk to him about cycling, the literature of mapping, and the city he has spent so long walking in, and so I couriered a letter to Sinclair, having gleaned his address from one of his old book dealing catalogues. One of the advantages of being a courier is that the garb – grubby bag and official-looking radio – grants anonymity and access, and I presented myself as being on official business. Or perhaps it’s because he’s used to uninvited visitors. Over the years Sinclair has
become the centre of a circuit that encompasses all of London. Writers plan trudges across the city with his house in mind as their destination. Strangers turn up on his doorstep seeking blessings, offering files of secret photographs, little magazines, scraps of map with their mad schemes drawn on them. They seek benediction and, like a friendly parish priest, Sinclair gives them time. He tells them what they want to hear.

He is no longer much of a cycling fan, but in
Hackney, that Rose-Red Empire
, a ‘confidential report’ of the borough he has lived in for decades, he describes exploring Hackney by bike. The ‘sharp-saddled bicycle was a collaborator in any reading of the city,’ he writes, ‘territory crossed and crisscrossed: burial grounds and back rivers explored.’

I had brought a copy of a book with me, a wartime edition of Flann O’Brien’s ‘Cruiskeen Lawn’ column for the
Irish Times,
which O’Brien had written under the nom de plume – one of many – ‘Myles na gCopaleen’. It was a samizdat edition printed on thick, war-rationed paper. I knew Sinclair was a fan, and O’Brien’s abiding interest in the metaphysical secrets of the bicycle seemed like an appropriate context within which to approach the question of a putative cyclogeography with Sinclair. A few weeks before we met I’d gone to a screening of Chris Petit’s film
The Cardinal and the Corpse,
a film about book dealing in the East End for which Sinclair had been hired as ‘freak wrangler’. The cast were a catalogue of shady
types, the people I’d read about for years in Sinclair’s books: Drifield the book dealer, bristling with slick dodginess; sci-fi visionary Michael Moorcock; the magician and comic book writer Alan Moore. The title of the film was significant too. It was taken from a book in the
Sexton Blake
series of boys-own adventure stories, rumoured to have been written by O’Brien under the name ‘Stephen Blakesley’.

When I arrived, Sinclair asked me to help him take in his recycling, grabbing a bin and pointing to a brown bag. In his Hackney book he writes of the perniciousness of our burgeoning eco-consciousness, the sinister way in which both cycling and recycling are becoming articles of faith rather than innocent activities. Soon there will be ‘knife fights in the street over blue bins with the wrong category of potato peel,’ he writes. We wheeled the bin through his house – neat, stuffed with books, orderly. ‘Where’s your bike?’ he asked, ‘Do you want to bring it in? Have you locked it up? Bikes are currency now, round here.’ I told him it would be fine: though a thoroughbred, it is camouflaged by its shabbiness.

Sinclair is tall and looks younger than his seventy years. It must be all that walking. His sitting room was full of pictures of birds. Beat-poetry books lined the shelves. A photograph of him riding a swan-shaped pedalo down the Regent’s canal looked down from the
mantelpiece. It was a souvenir from
Swandown
, a film he made with Andrew Kötting for which they rode a pedalo from Hastings to London on England’s secret waterways, a different kind of cyclogeographic
dérive
.

One thing that I’d always found attractive about Sinclair’s writing is the way it seems to map places I knew so well, but does so askew, as in a fairground mirror, uncovering overlooked perspectives and realities along the way. His work is both deeply local and strangely prophetic: it makes connections, makes public the secret networks of the city that would otherwise feel exclusive, and in conversation he’s the same. In between sentences he pulls books off his shelves and passes them to me, marshalling his evidence. Sinclair is used to this, to talking. Start him off and he gains momentum. Like a bicycle, in motion he gains stability. He knows what you’re there for – information loads, contact with some just-lost past.

Though he was welcoming he was wary of bikes, and somewhat hostile towards them. ‘Cycling is filling up the gaps,’ he told me. ‘After the canal path, it’s the pavements. We’re evolving into centaurs on wheels.’ It’s partly the misplaced nostalgia of the new cycling lobby he objects to, he said – the way the bicycle has ceased to be a subversive machine, as it was in the work of O’Brien and Beckett, but is now associated with nostalgic projections of an England that never was. In an essay for the
London Review of Books
a few years ago he described the new demographics that have emerged
around the MAMIL – the ‘middle-aged man in lycra’ – and the cult of the bike which attends him. He described ‘the Lycra-clad, peloton-inhabiting, short-haul commuter. They charge to work, Haggerston to Hoxton, Camden to Canary Wharf, as a yellow-tabarded bicycle race, dedicated to the legend of Alfred Jarry.’ By the year 2000, Sinclair wrote, the ‘modest and marginal eccentricity’ of the bicycle had been almost completely swept aside in favour of something far more sinister.

I asked Sinclair about his views on London cycling nowadays. ‘My relation to cycling is very complex,’ he said. ‘There was a time when cycling represented a sort of freedom, it gave you the freedom to cycle somewhere: across to Hackney Marshes, or down to Limehouse or wherever, to do the job and come back. The only people cycling were at working level in the city. When I was a gardener all the gardeners arrived by bicycle, because they wouldn’t have been able to afford cars. On the Lea, on the towpath, the only bicycles would be ridden by fishermen going off to the country, or occasionally those sort of English eccentrics – cyclists in the old style, train-spotter types. It was very hard to cycle then because they had barriers in front of every single bridge. It was a bit of a battle to go out, and you had to be careful to give precedence to walkers and people with kids, which now is just not the case at all. Quite the reverse.’

He’d written his novel
Radon Daughters
from the saddle, using the bike to get out to the limits of London
in a few hours, giving himself time to return home and write in the afternoon while things were still fresh in his mind. But these days he is ‘deeply suspicious’ of the bicycle, suspicious of its appropriation by politicians and bankers, not as a tool for work but as a means of colonising the city. ‘It is a perpetual battle,’ he said. ‘There are a few times I’ve been driving through London in the early evening and been surrounded by packs of sort of aggrieved respect-demanding cyclists, on all sides. It’s like driving through wolves. There is this sense of correctness: of “look what I’ve achieved.” All that makes me really stand back from it. You take your life in your hands when you cross these cycle paths.’

It is easy to share Sinclair’s hesitancy over the fanatical single-mindedness of the contemporary cycling lobby, but as a courier I’d found that the bike can still provide an escape, a way of hiding in plain sight. During the London riots in 2011 I’d cycled down to Clapton, hooded up, weaving through the throng and watching its exuberant destructiveness from the saddle. It was a perfect way of bearing witness. As long as your bike wasn’t too expensive-looking, and you didn’t have a shiny camera dangling round your neck, you were left alone. The bike provided a semblance of mob mentality and the ability to get away quickly if need be.