– Prologue –

an activity that forces you to think of the city in literary terms. With its signs and painted hieroglyphics the road is an encyclopaedia of movement: drive here, walk here, park here, no stopping here. Look down and the tarmac tells you what to do. Traffic lights regulate the entire mechanism like enormous clocks, telling you when to move and when to stop. Textures too are important: kerbstones separate walkers from the flow of traffic; knobbled paving alerts the blind to a coming crossing. Very soon the rhythms of the street become internalised. Traffic lights and vehicle indicators, the wails of sirens and car alarms, warn you to get out of the way or lure you on. Eventually you come to feel part of the city’s secret networks, at one with its hidden rivers and its dead-letter drops, at one remove from its anonymous crowds of commuters.

Alongside riding London I began to read it. I always kept a book in my bag for the slow days, and usually I sought out books that offered commentaries on my own working environment: anecdotal accounts of the city, or novels set in London, or histories of the city. Cycling itself felt like a form of interpretation – a mode of engaging with the urban text – and I also wanted to understand the strange and distinct attraction to place that I’d discovered by riding my bicycle, so I read about cycling too: biographies of the heroes of road racing, histories of the grand cycling Tours.

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