– CYCLOGEOGRAPHY –

cavernous loading bays and car parks burrowed away underground. It’s the iceberg theory of architecture. Another city ­exists alongside the London most people know, and cycle couriers are privy to this backstage city, with its post rooms manned by neon-tabarded security guards, its goods lifts, its secret, parallel infrastructures.

Most big commercial buildings feel like miniature city-states, and to a cycle courier the conflict between public and private, between the rules of the road and those of corporate estates, is constantly apparent. The glee with which the police hunt down and fine couriers who jump red lights (while letting off their commuting counterparts) is well known. But the guardians of private land are just as intolerant. In the biggest developments access for couriers is restricted to the cargo bays. Hulking ramps and doors must be navigated, pictures are taken, ID cards printed off stating your name, company, purpose, and privileges.

Sometimes, proclamations of ownership are local and specific, as in the small ‘Polite Notices’, which read as anything but, informing you that ‘Bicycles locked to these railings will be removed’. Elsewhere the limits of ownership spill out beyond the railings. Representatives of the ‘West End Company’ patrol Oxford Street in red hats, giving tourists directions and admonishing cyclists who ride on the pavements. Some large commercial estates, such as Devonshire Square off Bishops­gate in EC1, have their own ­private

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