The Pickwick Cycling Club first met on June 22, 1870, a fortnight after Charles Dickens’ death, at a hotel in Hackney. The club continues to operate and the building still stands on the edge of Hackney Downs.
One evening a few years ago, while walking through the park, a friend and I saw a woman lying next to her bicycle on the path. A group of young people jumped out of nowhere, she told us, knocked her off and ran away. We helped her to the nearest bench – her ankle was badly injured – and stayed with her until a police officer arrived. He took down our details, but didn’t sound very hopeful about catching the perpetrators.
The number cycling tours in London increased this year to an estimated 1.33 million per day. My current bicycle has been my main means of transportation for four and a half years. Days after I bought it someone tried to drill through the D-slot, but a neighbor chased them away. Several parts of it were stolen; replacing it cost me more than I paid for the machine in the first place.
“Thieves are getting smarter,” a bicycle repairman told me. “They know what’s expensive and they look for these parts.” He showed me a pair of gear levers worth £900, which were relatively easy to remove: just loosen the stem bolt and cut the brake cables. That happened to my bike last year (my shifters would have cost far less than £900). The mechanic never puts his bike outside: ‘I don’t even have a lock.’
Reasonably priced parts are increasingly difficult to find (Brexit doesn’t help). Someone I know recently saw a man with a bicycle, the wheels locked together, across a road in North London. He took photos of the man, who put on a balaclava and walked to a group waiting nearby. “There were a lot of cars around,” my informant said. “No one intervened.” He contacted the police but never heard back.
Another mechanic told me that he and his colleagues are checking the car BicycleRegister database when they think a bicycle brought to them may have been stolen. The red flags include mismatched parts, such as an expensive frame with cheap handlebars. Several bicycles have been returned to their owners in this way.
One person I spoke to said his cargo bike had been stolen from a ‘secure’ storage area beneath his apartment. Although he is “privileged enough” to be able to replace it, he said, cycling should be affordable for everyone. “Londoners are still much more likely to cycle if they are white, male, non-disabled, younger, from higher income households or live closer to central London,” the latest statement from the London cycling campaign. The activists are calling on the mayor and municipalities to ‘make a bicycle available to every Londoner’ by 2025.
I locked my bike outside Euston Tower before looking 20,000 by Cameron Griffin, an installation whose title refers to the average number of bicycles reported stolen in London each year. Griffin used a number of distorted locks, as well as his own bicycle, attached to a tall metal structure with a light at the top. While researching the project, he photographed mutilated bicycles and collected statements from people who had theirs stolen. They spoke of feeling “heartbroken,” “angry and upset,” “saddened and shocked.” (After visiting the exhibition, I found my bicycle intact where I had left it.)
Losing your bike in London isn’t the end of the world; That could be having a bicycle accident. While the number of traffic fatalities in the city has increased decreasingIndividual deaths – six cyclists this year – cannot be included in the statistics. In September 2023, Harry Webb and Gao Gao were murdered within days of each other in Hackney. Transport for London objectives to eliminate the number of deaths and serious injuries by 2041. New standards for lorries, which are involved in half of London’s cycling deaths, are introduced in October to improve visibility.
The LCC uses a card of the twenty most dangerous intersections in the capital. Pembury Circus in Hackney is not on the list, although it is infamous among local cyclists. The council has come up with what the Hackney Cycling Campaign calls a ‘dangerous redesign’. That of the campaigners proposalsupported by Webb’s parents, was rejected. Garmon ap Garth, the campaign coordinator, said the approved design “prioritizes aesthetics over safety.” Rob Coates, who worked on the alternative proposal, described the council’s argument that “they need to maximize placemaking at an intersection that will carry more than ten thousand vehicles a day” as “ridiculous.”
It is unlikely that a London police officer will ask: ‘Is it about a bicycle?’ A Met officer told me they take bike theft seriously, but admitted most such crimes go unsolved. They sometimes stop people with bikes that look “too expensive,” she said (in other words, people who seem “too poor”), and visit stores that “look dodgy,” even though you can’t prove much about a second-hand bicycle. bicycle.
During a webinar last month, Mike Daly of the Met’s Cycle Safety Team referred to a questionnaire conducted among female cyclists in London. More than 90 percent of respondents have been abused by other road users. Daly encouraged everyone to report incidents to help police “identify hotspots” and reallocate resources.
London cyclists have long been accustomed to road rage. In one History of the Pickwick Bicycle Club (1905), ‘the Hon. Mr Crushton’ describes an incident of 1876 to ‘demonstrate the feelings of bitter hostility with which cyclists were regarded by horse drivers’. Two cyclists, Mr Gee and Mr Mitchell, were trying to overtake a coach. The driver ‘began to drive over and over the road to prevent Gee from passing, and … hit him with a whip’; the guard ‘was even worse, for this diabolical miscreant was armed with a murder weapon, consisting of an iron ball at the end of a cord, undoubtedly intended for the destruction of cyclists in general’. Gee escaped unharmed, but ‘Mitchell… and his machine were thrown to the ground and both were dragged some distance.’ The book does not say where it happened, but it could have been Pembury Circus.
Leave a Reply