On the Road Bike (10 page)

I sat unhappily on this thing, all the while trying to convince myself that I was enjoying the experience, my thirty-something legs feeling themselves back into some sort of usefulness after a decade of sedentary motorway miles (my pursuit of a career in sports reporting had taken me up and down the M1, but it had not done much for my cardiovascular system).

Nonetheless I enjoyed the views of the lower reaches of the Thames as I rumbled along the riverside path. It was the movement that made it all worthwhile, a cold wind forcing water from the corners of my eyes; the sounds, even the smells (there are dog food and syrup factories nearby – a heady mix).

I used to ride along a twenty-minute waterfront stretch from my old house in Woolwich to the Underground station at North Greenwich. This is a long, ostensibly ugly reach of very tidal river, not the prettified riverside setting so beloved of ramblers further upstream where the Thames tickles Berkshire. There are no quaint pubs, nor creaking locks to negotiate.

Instead there are industrial units, a giant concrete-clad storage depot for Sainsbury's, mysterious, villainous pubs. Fred's Wood Workshop used to stand along the river, next to his son's metal yard. Cory Barges still go about their business, letting fly sparks as they cut and weld their floating stock, the barges that carry garbage from the City to the incinerators. Along this wide stretch of river, shingle and gravel from the sea bed are brought to shore and sifted into their constituent parts. Rusty conveyor belts rumble overhead as dredgers are unloaded. Their cargoes hold the dank smell of the North Sea's greyish depths. Now and then, the footpath silts up with lifeless sand, carelessly dropped from the boats.

Here, the river is broad, tidal and grey. At high tide it comes rushing towards London, slowed only by the silvery buttresses of the Thames Barrier and cut in two by the churning of the Woolwich ferry, whose two boats criss-cross the river in perfectly executed synchronicity, thundering their old diesel engines against the ebb and flow as they hold their position on the river. Built in 1963, they are great anachronisms, with names likes
Ernest Bevin
, and
John Burns
, who led the great Dock Strike of 1889, and coined the marvellous phrase ‘The Thames is liquid history'.

One day, someone will connect the North Circular to the South Circular road by building a giant new bridge, and the ferry will stop running forever. But in the meantime, this was the awe-inspiring backdrop to my earliest commute on a bike.

Some friends from Paris came to stay with us once. We lent their teenage daughter and her boyfriend some bikes, and suggested they rode this stretch of the Thames Path and that we'd meet them in the beautiful surroundings of Greenwich Park for a picnic. They set off full of youthful verve. By the time they reached us all waiting by the Royal Observatory, their faces had clouded over. They had found the experience, in their words, ‘apocalyptique', ‘dégolace'.

They were right, in their own way, the little Parisian prigs. The dull sweep of the estuary with its prosaic surrounds happens to be a source of constant wonder to me. But, if you are used to pinching aubergines for ripeness, scribbling poetry and sniffing flowers amidst the prettiness of the rue Mouffetard in Paris, then you are a long way from your comfort zone when you are cycling through Charlton. London is a brute, frankly.

My ride left behind the industrial remnants of the working river, and as the Greenwich peninsula drew its shape ahead of me, so too did the toy-town architecture of the Millennium Village, and its centrepiece, the Dome. That was my final destination. From there I would hop onto the Tube.

It was, I guess, about three miles, all in all. It was a great revalation to me that a bike ride on this scale was even possible.

I rode it, at a very gentle pace, in something like a quarter of an hour. And, arriving slightly breathless, I padlocked the bike and made my way underground, feeling glowing and virtuous. Within minutes, I was whisked into Central London.

Back at the station though, and while I was up in town working, my bike did not fare well. Malevolent forces went to work, picking over its aluminium carcass, harvesting the usable parts. Time after time I would return to find my lights missing, the saddle gone, a wheel nicked. Each time this happened, I would take the bike back to the workmanlike setting of Harry Perry's with increasing malaise.

‘I need a new saddle.'

He would look up from whatever bike was upside down in front of him. ‘Not again. Can't you leave it somewhere else?'

‘There is nowhere else.'

One week, and one new saddle later.

‘Back again, then, Ned?' He put down his spanner and wiped his hands on a cloth, as if he were a barman in a French bar, not a mechanic in Woolwich.

‘Why would anyone try and steal handlebars?' I wheeled in my decapitated bike.

He sighed and shook his head.

And then, he said it. Life-changing words, muttered innocently over a till as he racked up the price of the new set of handlebars.

‘Why don't you just ride all the way into London? It's not that far.'

Was the man insane? I had an instant vision of vast distance, like a Dalí landscape, an unreachable horizon. This was a journey of such prodigious length that it needed to be executed by subterranean electric trains, hurtling along at great speed through the blind, dark tunnels underneath London's sprawling mass, and overhead, mile after mile of Victorian streets blindly flashing by. It was an act of faith and hydraulics. It was not something you could accomplish by bike. That much, surely, was obvious.

‘Eight miles, door to door. Take you forty minutes.' He picked up his tools and returned his attention to the job in hand, leaving me gaping in the doorway to his shop, with the shape of my life already, imperceptibly changing.

My first trip into Central London by bike was my Road to Damascus. Actually, it was the road to Bermondsey, but I wasn't going to be fussy. It didn't take the predicted forty minutes, I was too slow for that back then, and besides, the half-deflated, heavy tread of my mountain bike tyres made the ride feel like driving a car with the handbrake still half-engaged. But it was a huge adventure.

On returning home late that afternoon, I felt as if my legs would seize up forever. They ached in a way that they had never ached before, my thigh muscles, my calves and lots of nameless tiny little fibres that make the joints bend. My body had been stunned into usage. I sat down on the toilet, as the bathtub filled, and then didn't have the strength to stand up unaided, having instead to fall off sideways and crawl to the bath, so I could haul myself up from floor level.

Then, washed and pomaded, and slightly full of myself, I sat at the head of the family dinner table, and held court on my considerable accomplishment. I kept my audience in thrall, like a solo polar explorer in human company for the first time in six months. I had seen things which required a telling. I had wrestled metaphorical bears, and vanquished them. My family hung on my every word.

‘The remarkable thing is it's actually not that bad once you're past Deptford. I suppose you even get to go through that bit of Surrey Quays which you normally can't drive up around the one-way system and there's a cycle lane the whole way through and actually the traffic could be worse and did you know about Southwark Park? Well, that's a whole thing in itself, never been there before and there's a bandstand and tennis courts and an art gallery right in the middle of it and you can turn left onto Tower Bridge, which cars can't do, and then when you're coming back you can stop off outside the Cutty Sark and grab a coffee without worrying about your bike because there's an open air café . . .'

My eldest daughter shrugged. My youngest banged a plastic spoon on the table and grinned at me toothlessly.

An awkward silence fell across the family table, and then they started talking about something else. I was left alone with my thoughts, which were now mostly played out in the muted pastel shades of an A to Z map.

London had opened up to me. The city that I had called home for the important part of my adult life had started to make a different kind of sense, and pose questions in entirely unexpected ways. And it did this, I understood, simply because of the movement of a bicycle.

My wonderment at the human body's ability to propel itself eight miles there and eight miles back was only the start. It wasn't long before my desire for greater bicycle-related adventure led me to embark on ever more ridiculous journeys. I upgraded my bike, buying a second-hand Shogun aluminium thing with a Campagnolo chain set, and allowed the Saracen to give itself over to rust under a tree in the garden.

The Shogun was a game-changer. I loved that bike with risible ardour. It cost me £350, and when it finally succumbed to a hairline fracture and had to be dismantled six years later, I honestly felt like I had lost a friend. It was skinny, gold and fast.

I fitted it with normal pedals at first. Then I bought some pedals with toe straps. Then I went the whole hog and bought cycling shoes with cleats. Naturally, I succumbed to a catalogue of slapstick tumbles while I got used to riding ‘clipped in'. The silliest of these involved turning right in front of three lanes of traffic on London Bridge, realising that they had the green light, trying to stop, and slowly falling sideways onto the tarmac, locked to the bike and smiling apologetically all the while. I lay on the tarmac for some time, blocking the entirety of London's southbound traffic heading over London Bridge, before my feet finally wriggled free and I was able to exit the scene, chastened and bruised.

Most of the miles I clocked up over the happy six years my Shogun and I shared together were ridden around London. Rarely did we venture out. Once we rode around the Scottish borders for a few undulating miles, and on another occasion we rode in and out of Edinburgh from my parents' house near Livingston. Both times, I found the lack of traffic, the noiselessness and isolation of the country road unsettling. Left alone with just the act of turning pedals and pushing onwards, I found my mind wouldn't settle. It couldn't break free from the narrow confines of the act. There weren't enough distractions. I needed a Ladbrokes and a Costcutter's within arm's reach.

No, London, with its ever-changing backdrop, its appalling dangers and its thousands of fried chicken shops and hair salons, was my cycling Nirvana. I enjoyed the cut and thrust and puncture, the elbows-at-the-ready nastiness and surprising camaraderie of the commute. I developed instincts for the rogue left-turning white van who overtook you simply to cut you up. I became wary of pedestrians, one of whom had stepped into my path and sent me to hospital with concussion. None of it deterred me though. The city drew me in. I am never more content, more distant from my everyday neuroses, than when I am perching on my saddle between the throbbing scarlet flank of a Number 53 bus and a parked black cab, or jostling for room alongside delivery vans and courier motorbikes in the green space reserved for cyclists at junctions.

Riding a bike over many years around a city as vast and intricate as London is like being a spider spinning a web. Scuttling off in every possible direction, leaving a silken trace of memory where it has been. For me, those traces connect Lewisham with Wembley, Richmond with Canning Town, Hammersmith with Croydon.

Like so many other London men and women of a certain age, I have discovered the unreserved joy of pushing past the capital's great, wind-picked water on a bright spring morning, or riding in the early-onset gloom of a November dusk through Hyde Park to London Bridge to see the hubris of the Shard tower rising month by month, or watch the shifting scenery, the shop fronts renovated, burnt out, gentrified, or boarded up for ever.

Few cities open up to the bike like London does.

The riding grew stranger, more niche. It became organised, almost becoming a pastime. Things were morphing fast into something new, and, as my curiosity grew, so London's sweeps and curves, lumps and bumps continued to amaze.

In the spring of 2011, I was invited by some complete strangers to take part in a gentle Sunday ride known as the London Classic. It was a bizarre London homage to the Belgian Classics, those one-day road races that invariably feature sharp climbs and long stretches of cobbles. After briefly scanning their website and watching a cheerful little film all about the 2010 edition of the ride (‘The Bone-Shaking Cobbles and The Lung-Busting Hills'), I contacted them back and gratefully accepted their invitation. It sounded fun. Sort of.

So one crisp Sunday morning, I rode over, with my friend Simon, to the pub in Crystal Palace where we were all to meet. We arrived too early. They were just setting out the trestle tables and starting to fry bacon. We drank a coffee and watched the organisers of the London Classic go about their work. They had entry forms to set out, race numbers to pin on jerseys and souvenir stickers for the bikes. They were secretly enjoying the administrative banality of it, while giving off the impression that they would rather have been anywhere else. I liked them. As they tut-tutted and joked with each other, I wondered how many other disparate hobbies were being pursued that morning (with tut-tutting and trestle tables) up and down this country of tut-tutting hobbyists.

When eventually we set off, we dropped down into Central London through Dulwich and Brixton. That much was fairly straightforward. Then, after crossing the river, the route became tortuous. Somewhere near Covent Garden it started going crazy, doubling back, looping round, zig-zagging and circling: doing nothing that so much as resembled a straight line for anything more than a hundred yards.

There was a reason for this. The organisation had scoured images of London on Google Earth for signs of cobbles. And everywhere they found them, they routed the ride. Little arrows were pinned on lampposts all along the thirty-seven miles. Some sections of pavé were only a few metres long. Others, such as those in Wapping, were a few hundred. All in all there were twenty-six sectors of cobbles (graded from one star to five), and seven ‘bergs', short, sharp climbs up and away from the river as we headed back to Crystal Palace. They bore iconic names: Maze Hill, Gypsy Hill, Honor Oak.