– CYCLOGEOGRAPHY –

but, other than the odd outlying raid on Peckham or Stockwell, would never go much further south than Elephant and Castle. Mostly I’d skim along Southwark Street, working the edge of the river which was once the greatest trade route in London but is now lined only with the husks of trade: warehouses and docks repurposed as office blocks and yuppie housing. To the North, the foothills of Camden, Highgate and Hampstead are the outer limits. There isn’t much work above the economic tree line.

Cycling through the city everyday makes you learn not only its abstract properties – street names, business addresses, the locations in which policemen like to lurk and wait to catch you running red lights – but what it feels like to ride down a particular road in the wet (mapping the placement of slippery drain covers that wait to catch you out on sharp turns) or the dry; the specific sequence of lights at a much-crossed junction. As a courier you learn to inhabit the places in between the pickups and the drops. You learn the secret smells of the city: summer’s burnt metallic tang; the sweetness of petrol; the earthy comfort of freshly laid tarmac. Some parts of London have their own smells, like olfactory postcodes. The Shisha bars on Edgeware road haze the area with sweet smoke; the mineral tang of Billingsgate fish market wafts over the Isle of Dogs.

Riding a bike for a living means you learn to read the road too, calculating routes, anticipating snarl-ups, dancing round potholes almost unconsciously. It is

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