discovered the unreserved joy of pushing past the capitalâs 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 Londonâs 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 (âThe Bone-Shaking Cobbles and The Lung-Busting Hillsâ), 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 âbergsâ, 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.
At the fearsome Vicarâs Hill (a Category Two climb), my family came out to cheer me on, it being just around the corner from my house.
This was a big moment for me. My home turf, my family out to honour me as I passed. How many times had I seen this enacted on the Tour? The local hero riding off the front of an indulgent peloton and into the bosom of his family at the roadside. But thatâs not quite how it happened.
Simon (an actor who you may remember from his defining role in a Bananabix advert which aired briefly in 1997), had the audacity to attack. It was an unforgivable breach of cycling etiquette. The jobbing thespian, whose stagecraft had helped to shift a banana-based cereal, crested the summit before me, and drew cheers and whoops from my turncoat children.
And then it all went wrong for the theatrical artist. From my perspective, a few dozen metres behind him on the climb, I was delighted to see him slow down to take the applause, lose balance and fall in a ghastly sideways arc towards
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 Londonâs 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 (âThe Bone-Shaking Cobbles and The Lung-Busting Hillsâ), 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 âbergsâ, 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.
At the fearsome Vicarâs Hill (a Category Two climb), my family came out to cheer me on, it being just around the corner from my house.
This was a big moment for me. My home turf, my family out to honour me as I passed. How many times had I seen this enacted on the Tour? The local hero riding off the front of an indulgent peloton and into the bosom of his family at the roadside. But thatâs not quite how it happened.
Simon (an actor who you may remember from his defining role in a Bananabix advert which aired briefly in 1997), had the audacity to attack. It was an unforgivable breach of cycling etiquette. The jobbing thespian, whose stagecraft had helped to shift a banana-based cereal, crested the summit before me, and drew cheers and whoops from my turncoat children.
And then it all went wrong for the theatrical artist. From my perspective, a few dozen metres behind him on the climb, I was delighted to see him slow down to take the applause, lose balance and fall in a ghastly sideways arc towards
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