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– 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 6
page 17
– 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. 7

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– 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

6

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