The Last London

by Iain Sinclair

  ‘So: that nice Chris was there, yeah? Angus gets, like, a grand. My job… A 19-year-old… She said could she come up to lunch? So there was, like, no lunch. I said, “Can you give me a lift to the tube?” He’s such a bad driver. She sat there eating, like… a sandwich? So, it’s me, isn’t it? She will not…’

  ‘My wife was a senior manager.’

  ‘She’s forty-seven. Has she thought about the future?’

  The wolves of the peloton express, in a blur of territorial imperatives, from the dark bore of the bridge, sharp elbows poking for position on the constricted run to Victoria Park. You can hear snorts of entitlement as the pumping thighs of Canary Wharf mercenaries are frustrated, for as much as six seconds, by a floaty Bloomsbury woman on a rattletrap. As a walker, you don’t see the whispering assassins until they are past you. A sudden cut of air. A bell that doesn’t ting. The goggled scorn of dismissal for anachronistic life forms.

  Motorised traffic on adjoining streets, already slower than the saintly cyclists, is being regulated to 20mph. Which gives more time for texting and checking messages. 20mph on the towpath is launch momentum as gladiators, hepped to the gills by Tour de France footage and the triumphs of pollen-suffering Olympians with Therapeutic Use Exemptions, weave and accelerate. Those sneaky foreigners are swapping bags of piss before testing. Our boys, it is now alleged, take the same shots. But they have genuine hay fever allergies and Belgian doctors’ certificates. And unexplained Jiffy bags with innocent medication.

  The skinny wheels of a man caught in the middle of the pack slide in a groove left by recent improvements to the towpath. He plunges, at pace, straight into the canal. The peloton race on. Survival of the fittest. There is no fraternal support for the second leg of this unofficial Iron Man triathlon. You’re not supposed to swim while you are still on your bike. The man sinks in the saddle.

  It takes me a few minutes, dodging through the next wave bombing from the tunnel to reach him. The cyclist hauls himself out and lies gasping and shivering on the edge, fanned by the backdraft of the swish of wheels. The bike weighs nothing and I pull it out. It must feel like riding on an idea, a line drawing. He seems like a decent chap, in shock to be grounded. He shakes his head to get the water out. The bike is undamaged. The man is most concerned about his phone. He pats lycra padding with multiple pockets to find where it is lodged. The glinting wafer didn’t appreciate the sudden baptism but it still works.

  That morning, up to the moment of drama, was a quiet one: sixty-six cyclists used the towpath on my ten-minute stroll between Victoria Park and the Cat and Mutton Lock. Along with an almost equal number of joggers. At weekends, there would be more joggers, fewer bicycles. On this day, myself included, I counted four walkers. Two of them, South Korean martial arts practitioners, had a heated discussion before moving into the next phase of their discipline. I recognised a regular, a woman wedded to the towpath. Despite everything, she bustled along for years, staring ahead in paralysed disbelief. Now she held an open newspaper in front of her like a Plexiglass shield. Two of the sixty-six cyclists, both women in hats, approaching the railway bridge, sounded their bells.

  ***

  How did it begin, the cycling initiative? The grand thesis, paid for in lives, that getting London mounted on two wheels would solve our problems; not only transport chaos, but quality of life. We would be better people in a healthier city. We would be almost Dutch or German or Scandinavian, while negotiating killer junctions, lethal bridges, alongside fleets of authentically European lorries heaving material to the new Lea Valley frontier, the building sites of the City. No aspiring politician could be caught at the garden gate without bicycle or helmet. Boris Johnson’s machine was surgically implanted. Jeremy Corbyn, the people’s tribune, was obliged to confirm his integrity by being grumpy with TV crews, before shoving off, helmet secured, towards the day’s grave business. No more motorbike and sidecar tours of East Germany. The modern leader is an urban centaur.

  Hard to picture Margaret Thatcher embedded in any vehicle other than a Crusader tank or a spanking new British motor. Ethical cycling was a New Labour initiative. In his retirement from the front line, the grand consigliere of the movement, Lord Mandelson of Foy, single shareholder in the late-lamented Millennium Dome on Bugsby’s Marshes, talked confidentially to an unseen interrogator for a televisual portrait by Hannah Rothschild. How privileged we were, within the kabuki stylisation of eyebrow ballet, the heart-rending sighs over the shortcomings of colleagues, to be granted a glimpse of the child behind the man; young Peter’s induction into political life. Picture this: the juvenile New Labour dignitary on a Hovis bicycle! Lord Mandelson cut a smile. And rested his head on leathered support as the camera-car cruised him through London, the city he had done so much to revive.

  Triggered by an archive clip of his maternal grandfather Herbert Morrison, another ennobled socialist cabinet minister, Mandelson launched into a cherished memory of cycling around Hendon, committee room to polling station, bearing leaflets, carrying messages as proudly as the freshly baked loaves in Ridley Scott’s celebrated commercial, shot in 1973, on the picturesque slopes of Shaftesbury. Carl Barlow, the youth who featured in the advertisement, underscored by the slow movement of Dvořák’s Symphony No. 9, arranged for brass, went on to become a fireman in East Ham. And to find himself caught up in the aggravations of the Thatcher period: belt-tightening, union-bashing, the cracking of rebellious coal miners’ heads. Lord Tebbit’s helpful remarks, delivered to a sea of nodding grey, at Blackpool in 1981, in the aftermath of the Handsworth and Brixton riots, will have carried a special charge for Barlow. ‘On yer bike!’

  Hovis, thanks to Ridley Scott, preceded New Labour and Boris Johnson as sponsors of the cult of cycling. (Scott was a cycle obsessive. His first short film, made in 1965, in his student days at the Royal College of Art, featured his younger brother Tony schlepping around Hartlepool, and was called Boy and Bicycle.) Every inch pedalled is a gesture towards saving the planet. YouTube is blistered with propaganda for cycle schemes funded by the generosity of corporate bankers. And cyberspace has been wormed by guerrilla footage of the real Boris Johnson chuntering on his mobile phone as he labours towards City Hall – as well as faked sequences of a clone with a flop of golden hair stunting on underpasses and concrete ramps. Cycling was invented for the internet, the pirate phone-snatch at twilight, and the GoPro helmet.

  The Tebbit sound-bark – On yer bike! – has returned, to remind us how neatly cycle rhetoric rhymes with agitation in the streets and the slashing of social services. Thatcher’s Employment Secretary, a former BOAC pilot, not yet parachuted into the House of Lords, recalled the defining moment of his childhood – and, as with Peter Mandelson, it involved a bicycle. ‘I grew up in the Thirties with an unemployed father,’ Tebbit avowed. ‘He didn’t riot. He got on his bicycle and looked for work.’

  Man and machine, molecules shaken by the cobbles, intermingle in a rapturous genetic blind date. Tebbit’s paterfamilias, puffing from factory gate to factory gate, becomes a symbol of the decade, half-man and half-bicycle, in the fashion of Flann O’Brien’s The Third Policeman.

  ‘The gross and net result of it,’ O’Brien wrote, ‘is that people who spent most of their natural lives riding iron bicycles over the rocky roadsteads of the parish get their personalities mixed up with the personalities of their bicycle as a result of the interchanging of atoms.’ When O’Brien’s novel The Dalkey Archive, in which James Joyce returns to Dublin as a bar curate, was adapted for the stage, they called it When the Saints Go Cycling In.

  But it wasn’t just Tebbit who exploited Ridley Scott’s brand of sentimentality to summon an England that never was. John Major, a gap-year prime minister sleepwalking through a job for which he was never intended, offered a reprise of George Orwell’s cycling spinster to bring back common decency to an England imagined as a Midsomer Murders village green. But neither of these conservative philosophers, Major or Tebbit, appreciated the inflammatory effect t
hat bicycles have on the libido; the erotic impulses unleashed by the potentialities of the open road. That intimate contact with a hard leather saddle. The steady pumping rhythms. The gasping for breath on a steep ascent. The ecstatic, effortless, downhill swoop, hair blowing free: aaaaaahhhh!

  The pataphysician Alfred Jarry was so excited by the crotch-hugging kit of the years before the First World War that he took to dressing in the uniform of a cycle racer. He caused a scandal by following the poet Mallarmé’s funeral cortege on a bicycle. Jarry’s text, ‘The Passion Considered as an Uphill Bicycle Race’, was the acknowledged inspiration for JG Ballard’s ‘The Assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy Considered as a Downhill Motor Race’. The psychosexual derangement of Ballard’s Crash (1973) would have dissolved into low Carry On comedy if the humble Raleigh had replaced the Ford Cortina as the vehicle of choice for navigating the perimeter fence of suburban promiscuity. Jarry, in a vision admired by the surrealists, gazed into the window of a bicycle dealer to discover ‘a reproduction of a veritable crown of thorns as an ad for puncture-proof tyres’.

  HG Wells, right back at the start of the cycling craze, was quick to recognise the liberating possibilities of this new technology. In The Wheels of Chance (1896), a draper’s assistant uses his annual holiday to take to the roads of Surrey and Sussex, where he encounters a young lady whose head has been turned by romances featuring New Women in rational costume pedalling towards independence: by way of the coaching inns of Haslemere, Midhurst and Bognor.

  Hoopdriver, the Wells excursionist, is encouraged, before he sets off, by advice from a non-cycling co-worker: ‘Don’t scorch, don’t ride on the footpath, keep to your own side of the road.’ A reasonable code now being shredded by the urban middle classes as they haul themselves, with the odd tumble, on to a flotilla of Bromptons and Marins. Hoopdriver’s informant makes the premature claim that cycling is fashionable: ‘Judges and stock-brokers and actresses, and, in fact, all the best people rode.’

  In Hackney, by 2010, this century-old prediction was confirmed along canal paths, parks and pavements. Judges and bankers and actors, stand-up comedians, radio producers, script editors, architects, junior doctors, cadet drug dealers, broadsheet journalists, graffiti photographers, libel lawyers and website designers from Old Street: they did their bit to complicate London’s traffic chaos, by staying away from stuttering buses, where they would be brought into contact with the sweltering mass of immigrant humanity. The social status of cycling, thanks to propaganda campaigns spearheaded by Bullingdon Club toffs such as Boris Johnson, David Cameron and George Osborne, underwent significant revision.

  In the late Sixties and early Seventies, when the path alongside the Regent’s Canal was mud, forbidden to pedestrians and cyclists alike, I rode to my gardening job in Limehouse on a wreck bought from Kingsland Waste market for £6. Municipal gardeners and labourers were supposed to get around, tea shack to work site, on bicycles. Some students and food-for-free survivalists also chose two-wheel transport. No self-respecting narrowboat was complete without a bicycle on deck. With the surge of canalside development in the run-up to the 2012 Olympics, I noticed a standard feature of the emerging new-build blocks: the higher the floor, the more bicycles on the balcony. These machines, with their fashionably slim wheels, heralded a new demographic: the liberated short-haul commuter.

  The British Waterways authority found it necessary to issue a green pamphlet, in verse, to instruct cyclists in towpath etiquette: ‘Two Tings. Ting your bell twice… pass slowly, be nice!’ And there followed a long list of rules for the peloton to ignore: rules for bridges, for bends, for wildlife habitats. Ting ting. ‘Earphones/headphones should not be worn.’ Ting ting.

  I interviewed Jock McFadyen, an inveterate haunter of the towpath. ‘Every time I hear that ting,’ he said, ‘I feel like kicking one of the bastards into the canal. Don’t ting me! You can’t walk.You’ve got to be constantly standing aside, standing aside. If you hear that ting and you ignore it, then you get called a muppet, a fool. Every trip down the Regent’s Canal is an exercise in confrontation.’

  By the time, stepping westward towards Islington, you arrive at the courtyard development that has grown out of the former Gainsborough film studios, the convoy of cyclists, fretting and tinging, is a permanent sound installation: squeak of brakes, rattle of loose paving slabs. Curses are lobbed at obstacles, including pedestrians.

  Behind a ground floor picture window in one of the blocks, resting bikes have been arranged like an indoor docking station, waiting for sponsorship from Barclays or Santander. The deserted gymnasium belongs to that tragic period, maybe five years ago, when cyclists preferred to play safe by avoiding the hazards of the road, and pumping away, to piped music, without going anywhere. Their tranced gaze was fixed on a screen: landscape pornography, satellite sport with irritating stockmarket statistics dripping down the border of the frame. One room in every new development has been set aside to stack bikes.

  Security is a major consideration. Bicycles are both the instruments facilitating a local crime wave (ram raids, drug deliveries, phone snatches) and the object of crime. The theft and redistribution of bicycles, rapidly liberated with bolt-cutters, is a substantial element in the black economy. It is rumoured that container loads disappear, weekly, in the direction of the Balkans. When a utopian cycle scheme was launched in Cambridge in 1993, all 300 machines were stolen on the first day; broken down for spares or shipped out by free-marketeers quick to spot an opportunity. Halfords attempted a similar programme in London, distributing ten bicycles around the city, in order to publicise the health benefits of cycling: lose weight by seriously emptying your wallet on a replacement upgrade. When the six-week scheme concluded, the bikes would be sent, as a charitable gesture, to Africa. There was a zero return at the end of the experiment.

  ‘Never in my puff did I hear of any man stealing anything but a bicycle when he was in his sane senses,’ says the Sergeant in The Third Policeman (begun in the 1940s and published in 1967). ‘Surely you are not going to tell me at my time of life that the world is changing?’

  Urban cycle promotions, as Lord Mandelson would recognise, are about entitlement and ecology. Entitlement to credit by politicians and planners. And the sound ecology of recycling ideas that have bounced around for generations. Kulveer Ranger, dapper transport adviser to Mayor Johnson, swiped his card at a docking station for the benefit of the early evening television news: the first man in London to release a Barclays bike without having to go through the tedious online application process. The card was refused. He moved swiftly to the next slot: no go.

  Ranger explained away the glitch as a translation problem between incompatible systems. When he finally got on his bike, for a charity rally across Europe, he ran slap into a pedestrian on an unmarked road in Tbilisi, the Georgian capital. ‘He came out of nowhere,’ Ranger protested, before his passport was impounded.

  Boris Johnson is airfixed to the saddle: fit for purpose, blundering into scrapes with other journalists, unsinkable, in your face, a polar bear on a unicycle. David Cameron pedals too, shadowed by security in the big black car; a bizarre parody of the industrial worker, as represented by Albert Finney in Karel Reisz’s film of Alan Sillitoe’s Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. Back in 1960, the most exciting young actor of his generation jolted across Nottingham cobbles. He was tracked, as Cameron in Notting Hill is now, by an unseen camera truck. The freedom of moving through a city, weaving around crocked pedestrians, doing the banter, in full English weather. Well paid, smart, cocky: up for it. Time to mould wet hair in a dirty mirror. British industry is thriving. Exports are good. Everybody is spending. Onward and upward. It would last forever.

  Sleeves rolled over muscled arms, Finney knocks out parts for Raleigh bicycles in the industrial heartlands. End of regimented subservience to unseen bosses. Foremen in dun coveralls. Cigarettes in cupped fists. The bikes streaming from the factory gates are bought at discount, like the cars of workers on the
assembly lines at Dagenham and Cowley.

  The first episode of the black and white soap opera Coronation Street, also screening in 1960, used a bicycle as a symbol of class division. Ken Barlow (William Roache), a live-at-home student, paralysed by infusions of the Manchester Guardian, is outraged when his father and brother mend a puncture on the carpet, in front of the living room fire. Cilla Black’s recorded memory of watching the launch of Coronation Street involved trying to peer at the screen, to witness Barlow’s inner-tube wrestle, over the back of her father, who was carrying out the same operation in the parlour at Scotland Road, Liverpool.

  The bike, that aspirational prize gifting the migrant poor a better shot at city life, suffers a long period (c. 1960–2000) of cultural invisibility, before re-emerging as a transport solution for New Labour. There was something noble, in the years after the Second World War, in Vittorio De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves. Noble and sentimental. The simple machine, offering employment in a depressed Rome, is solicited like the thighbone of a saint. The narrative pitch is so convincing that it is reprised in 2001 by Wang Xiaoshuai as Beijing Bicycle. In pre-Olympic China, possession of a bike guarantees employment as a messenger. The city, not yet in thrall to devastating development between six orbital motorways, is powered by bicycles: factory labourers, schoolchildren, office workers – and street gangs pretending they are riding with Marlon Brando in The Wild One.

  The cultural historian Patrick Wright, in Passport to Peking (2010), quotes the Labour politician Morgan Phillips, who visited China as part of a delegation in 1954. ‘As I saw the great mass of cycles on the road I was reminded of a day in Bedford during the last war… The workers were leaving the factory for the lunch hour break. All at once I seemed to be submerged in cycles. Peking is just like that.’