cyclingcultures.org.uk

Today I had a morning meeting on Southwark Street, so decided to strap the GoPro – recently repaired – to my handlebars. Unfortunately, the angle turned out to have been a bit wonky, so I didn’t quite get the results I was after. However, the nice thing about the fish-eye lens is that you get some quite intriguing results even if it wasn’t exactly what you expected…

London Fields, Hackney

I chose the apparently most direct route down Bishopsgate. How people choose routes is becoming one theme of the research – in terms of what information they make use of, what criteria they use to make decisions, and what stuff they take with them to navigate (from a GPS equipped Smartphone to my own preferred option, crumpled bits of paper).

My own decisions don’t always seem great, in retrospect. While the route from London Fields to Southwark via Bishopsgate is direct on the map, in practice it was slow and blocked with parked and moving motor vehicles; I often had to slow down and then speed up to nip through traffic, assuming an assertive riding position to make me at least feel larger and more visible. I saw other cyclists doing the same. There were plenty of small lorries, large vans, and buses on the roads.

Here a parked Royal Mail van and a (slowly) moving out of town coach.

Even if people don’t set out to customise bikes, they often acquire various forms of decoration along the way. Here are a couple of examples of stickers – above a slogan, below a reggae club night.

As in my previous post, it’s not necessarily the nuts, bolts, and bits of a bicycle that matter – or rather, they might matter because they embody friendships and relationships, as well as forms of connectedness to the world. An interviewee yesterday told me that she’d started cycling but had the second hand bicycle she was using stolen. Her friends realised that she was miserable without her bike, and clubbed together to buy her a new one. The bike matters because it’s her way of getting around and of knowing the city, but also because it reminds her of her friends and that they cared enough to get her a new bike.

On a less happy note, several Hackney interviewees have recently spoken to me about sexist verbal and physical abuse experienced while cycling. The subject has also been covered in the Guardian Bike Blog. Cyclists can be vulnerable in a society where harassment of women is common, and where cyclists in general are too often seen as “out of place”, illegitimate road users, as Dave Horton describes. Interviewees have spoken about changing the way they dress or the times they cycle (early morning instead of rush hour) to try to avoid harassment. Despite this, cycling is also described as potentially opening up areas and travel times associated with problems of personal safety (for example, through parks, which interviewees would avoid at night on foot).

Having returned from a cycling holiday in the Netherlands (see here for some initial thoughts on cycling there) it’s been back to the project data. I conducted two interviews yesterday morning and continued taking pictures of bits of bikes, which – once I have access to Photoshop again – I will be combining with quotes to provide a different visual take on our material. Here for example is a bike in an office.

I took this picture because the interviewee talked about her battle against theft, part of which was the struggle to get her employer to allow people in her building to keep bikes in their offices. One of the bikes she owns was very cheap, and this is the only one she will now lock up outside due to experiences of theft.
The second interviewee also talked about the fear of theft, so I took some pictures of bits of her bike that she said she had left deliberately “tatty” to discourage potential thieves…

Bike theft is something that cyclists in Hackney (and Hull, and many other places) must be constantly aware of. Feeling about bike theft vary depending upon the meanings attached to the bike by its owner. Interviewees have described how particular stolen bikes had a special significance for them – perhaps the bike was bought in childhood, perhaps it belonged to a parent or friend who has died, or perhaps it was the bike that got them back into cycling as an adult or on which they undertook a particularly meaningful journey… Losing such a bike means losing the physical embodiment of memories. A bicycle can be a special mememto, bringing back a person or a time through the experience of using it, as well as looking at it.