– Prologue –
police force. Anyone who isn’t obviously an office worker, snatching a lunchtime sandwich in the open air, is moved on. Running is forbidden.
I worked as a bicycle courier for three years, on and off, as I bided my time in between stretches back at university and tried to work out what to do with my life. I loved every moment of it. Or perhaps love is the wrong word. For after a while on the bike, doing this work, you simply need to carry on to feel normal. You feel ill if you don’t work five days on the bike, anxious and twitchy when you take your feet off the pedals. You can’t sleep without the weariness provided by the miles.
A bicycle courier’s experience of London is formed by the demands and rhythms of capitalist circuits. Couriers occupy a contained space, the boundaries of which are fluid, established by the economic footprint of what our controllers – intermediaries between client and courier who take booked jobs and issue them over the radio to riders – contemptuously refer to as the ‘push-bike circuit’. The rough borders of the circuit run round practical limits described by the confluence of physical capacity and the post-code system. Wapping, populated by exiles from Fleet Street, forms the eastern hub; Knightsbridge marks the Western front. There’s usually not enough short-hop work to justify sending bicycles much further. The circuit doesn’t penetrate far south. Occasionally I’d dash over the river,
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