Cycling Cultures blog

This was one of the comments we received at the Cambridge Cycling Campaign meeting this week. It was raised as something to be discussed and unfortunately there wasn’t enough time to do it justice in the context of talking about the broad and complex issues of UK cycling cultures. I thought I might do a bit more now.

Firstly, things that are obvious to some are not obvious to everyone . This is the essence of culture. We only have to travel to another town, not even to another country, to notice how cultural practices and norms change. Suddenly, we realise that the things that we think are ‘natural’, things that we take for granted are ours alone and different ways of living, different logics, exist in other places. These are the fundamentals of sociological research – attempting to understand the normative social and cultural structures that shape everyday life.

Obvious things are the first things we lose sight of . The norms and governing social rules by which we live our everyday lives tend to be mundane and boring. They become invisible. Drawing attention to these, rendering them visible, is one way of seeing them with fresh eyes and finding new ways of interrogating them – to understand where they have come from, how they are made and constantly sustained. A core tenet of ethnography, a particular qualitative research method, is to see the world through the eyes of participants. The researcher gains a nuanced understanding by immersing herself in the social, cultural and physical worlds of a particular group. It involves constantly comparing the unfamiliar with the familiar in an attempt to generate ‘a self-conscious awareness of what is learned, how it has been learned, and the social transactions that informed the production of such knowledge’ (Hammersley and Atkinson 1996:101).

Obvious things are not fixed or static . We are flexible emotional beings living in complex human and non-human networks. Our meanings and understandings of the world are made and re-made on a daily basis. We produce meaning in our actions, interactions and language in and around the things around us. These change. We change. Looking closely at these things enables us to see what operates as catalysts to facilitate these changes. I am currently doing archival cycling research and reading ‘obvious’ things from the 1890s which brings to light the extraordinary fight women had in challenging the social, political and physical constraints of Victorian society to ride safety bicycles, wear bifurcated skirts and rise up against the abuse hurled at them in the streets.

Obvious things are not boring . Susan Leigh Star, one of my favourite writers, has done much to advocate the study of ‘boring’ things. She focuses on infrastructures, arguing that they are often overlooked because they are considered ‘singularly unexciting’ (1999:377). Partially this is because they have taken the mode of pipes supplying water or sewerage or cables that channel electricity and phone data, which means they are either hidden in the landscape and architecture of the home or have become so ubiquitous they are rendered invisible. She argues that it is only through a study of the unstudied, the things we take for granted, that we can hope to see new and previously neglected connections and meanings. Although we are fully aware of how these infrastructures furnish essential services we are also content to ignore them until such times as they fail or breakdown. This approach attends to the idea that seemingly unremarkable artefacts and systems make explicit the familiar and taken-for-granted ways in which people make sense of and operate in everyday life.

Ultimately, if we are doing our job well then the people in our research should recognise themselves and see the ‘obvious’ in our results. Yet, to others outside this field of research our findings should be much less obvious, more surprising and potentially interruptive.

Having completed four days cycle instructor training I am now NSIP, or National Standards Instructor, Provisional – to give it its full title. One interesting aspect of doing cycle instructor training is the way that you become more aware of cycling tactics: your own and other people’s. On the final day we did a bit of ethnographic observation which showed us the sometimes unorthodox ways in which people made use of infrastructure in quite a difficult environment for cycling (a 1960s built large roundabout with flyover). We must have also looked like the Advanced Stop Line police – a group of 11 people most in high-vis and helmets with bikes, hanging over the railings and staring! (This seemed to affect car driver behaviour somewhat).

Also today I went down to Brighton University to speak at the School of Applied Social Sciences seminar series; my talk was entitled ‘Of Bike Nuts and Plodders’. Slides from the talk are here. It was based partly on the ‘Proper Cyclists’ stuff; with additional material comparing Hull and Hackney. An interesting discussion and good to meet up with Michael and Lesley from the Brighton Sustainable Mobilities Group .

Slides are here:

I have been in Adelaide for the Australian Cycling Conference which happily co-incided with the Tour Down Under . Having lived here during my PhD in 2006/07, I am fond of the city and have always found it particularly nice to get about by bike. The past week however has seen an otherwise cycle-friendly city become even more inundated with cyclists and all manner of eclectic bicycles. I have seen very expensive carbon fibre, steel tourers, vintage tricycles, shoppers, hand-made freakbikes, bone-shakers, cargo bikes, penny farthings and more.

I went to the opening night of the London Bike Film Festival at the Barbican and was excited to see a range of creative and diverse bike-related activities and objects in the foyers such as hi-viz nail varnish by Wah Nails Salon, cycle-powered drinks machines and Gavin Turk’s fleet of 20 specially designed and painted bicycles.

Although these were interesting I particularly taken by:

Mitsuhiro Aita’s Cycle-house

The Pret A Rouler fashion show

Siobhán McAuley’s ‘ Faster, Faster’ – Bicycle, zoetrope, moving parts.

and Rimski’s Piano.

I am reading Roger Deakin’s delightful Waterlog: A Swimmer’s Journey Through Britain and yesterday I found this:

Swimming is often enhanced by company, and sometimes by solitude. The same individual may swim for different reasons on different days. I certainly do. The joys of swimming are sometimes those of silence and solitude, sometimes of communion with nature, and sometimes the more friends who join you, the merrier. As with any mildly dangerous sport, there is safety in numbers when you swim in company, as when you climb or walk in the mountains. But there is also strength in numbers if your right to bathe in this or that particular mudhole is at all questioned.

Outdoor swimmers, especially in the wild, have always been outsiders with a shared vulnerability to the rigours of the elements and seasons, and to whoever seeks officiously to prevent them from risking their necks, or disturbing the trout.

(Except for the trout) does this remind you of any other type of sport?
Deakin recognises this too.
He goes on…

Swimming without a roof over your head is now a mildly subversive activity, like having an allotment, insisting on your right to walk a footpath, or riding a bicycle. It certainly appeals to free spirits, which is why the talk is invariably so good in those little spontaneous bankside, beach or poolside parliaments that spring up wherever two or three swimmers are gathered, as though the water’s fluency were contagious. (2000:115-116)

Deakin’s romantic and poetic account of swimming in the UK got me thinking about a cycling encounter I had on Saturday.

I was cycling from Herne Hill to central London when I got chatting with a man on an impressive cargo bike. I admit I am easily impressed by cargo bike but this was of a scale and elegance not normally sighted in the city. Frequent red lights provided excuses to talk and he told me of it’s structure, steering and load capacity – it was usually used to ransport 50kg but was capable of 100kg! These companionable bursts of conversation continued from South London to Covent Garden. Stuck once more in a snarl of traffic, he asked if I wanted to try it. I said yes. We swapped bikes and I set off to cycle a very busy street while he held my road bike on the footpath. I was nervous. Not only that this was a very expensive machine, but I was in road cleats on flat pedals and the street was filled with tourists, cabs doing 360s and many many cyclists, including pedicabs. At first it wobbled a lot. It was disconcerting not to see the front wheel and have the steering column turn even though the big cargo box in front remained straight ahead. And the seat was too high. I returned and he adjusted the seat. I tried again, this time down hill and something clicked. I cycled on, turned around and came back. It felt incredibly smooth and responsive. And the potential of it was exciting. We chatted again, introduced ourselves, swapped bikes and cycled away.

This spontaneous encounter with a cycling stranger made London feel like a very friendly place. It engendered an extraordinary level of trust in a city where cyclists we are constantly reminded about theft and security, of accidents and safety, of cycling defensively and being aware of traffic. Yet, here we simply connected over a lovely bike. Our shared interest in cycling made talk easy and it made my day.

I’ve been wanting to the North Sea Cycle route for a while and in August, I took a week to do the bit that skirts Holland and then took other cycle routes through Germany. Our plan was to head up to Copenhagen to visit friends for the weekend. Everything was going well until Lubeck when we discovered that we could not get our bikes on the train to Lolland. (We wanted to hop across to Denmark and continue the cycle but trains and time was against us). So, we ended up on a train direct to Copenhagen. A much longer trip would have been better as a week barely gets you into the rhythm of touring. Nevertheless it was great to experience the Netherlands and Germany by bike.

Time: 6 days
Distance: 680kms ++
Start: Hook of Holland (The Netherlands)
Night 1: Egmond aan Zee, Bergen
Night 2: Holwerd
Night 3: Bad Nieuweschans
Night 4: Berne (Germany)
Night 5: Jork
Night 6: Lubeck
Train to Copenhagen

We were not the only tourers to catch the Harwich to Hook of Holland ferry.

The North Sea Cycle route was well marked once you looked for these signs and worked out that LF1b was east and LF1a was west. (We did a lot more than the 680kms as we went off track quite a bit at first.)

It was interesting to see some of the cycle infrastructures, such as this secure parking and toilet station in Den Haag.

A system of interconnected cycle paths took us through sand dunes….

… along beaches…

… and through farms.

It was used by a wide variety of cyclists; families with small children, roadies, commuters and tourers. Helmet spotting became a game as they were pretty rare.

We did however spot an eclectic range of cycles.

And the route was dotted with local stalls offering home made produce.

Ah, the cycling appetite is a wonderful thing.

Earlier this week, I was talking to Katrina about how devices shape experiences of cycling. While on cycling holidays this year we’ve each had with us bits of kit recording how far we’d been. It turned out we’ve each had the experience of getting a bit lost but not being quite so bothered because “it’ll still count towards the kilometres”! (And I was annoyed on my holiday when my device ran out of battery part way through the longest day ride – of course the device would have recorded all the little wiggles and diversions as well as allowing me to feel secure in the number eventually arrived at…)

The use of mobile devices has become a theme in some of the Hackney interviews in particular. Talking to an interviewee recently who has a cycle computer, she described how she has tailored her commute so it hits twenty kilometres, and how she likes having a record of all the mileage that she’s done on the bike. Does the use of these devices intercede between us and our journeys, meaning that we prioritise the device over the journey experience (as I’ve heard argued with respect to GPS for cars)? Or should it rather be seen as enabling new ways of planning and experiencing journeys?

Another interviewee has described how having a smart phone has reduced her fear of getting lost on new journeys, because it is immediately possible to check her location and get directions. The route chosen could be shaped by whether one is using a specialist cycle map (e.g. OpenCycleMap ) or a general map which may be aimed more at drivers. Offline, I have got confused looking at an A-Z map of Hull (which I don’t know so well as Hackney) and failing to find the cycle paths that I have followed, as they are not marked and just appear as empty space. Similarly roads may appear “closed” but may actually be filtered for permeability.

The growing use of such mobile devices allows cyclists to map routes, to share information, and to provide advice to others online. Similarly, there are a number of videos shared online illustrating particular places or particular rides, such as the new London Cycle Superhighways. Some cycling websites, like Bristol Traffic , record and share pictures of illegally parked cars, providing a form of surveillance sometimes resisted by its targets. It will be interesting to look at how the use of mobile devices varies in our different case study areas.

This is a typical image from London’s Critical Mass. Hundred of cyclists gathered in an iconic London location. We are paused on Parliament Square. Cyclists are lifting their bikes in the air. Music is playing, people are cheering and bells ringing. Someone lifts one of the new Cycle Hire bikes in the air, which cannot be easy. But it is worth it as it is greeted with even more cheers, whistles and laughter.

As I cycle home from Critical Mass I am surprised to see people sitting on the stationary bikes in one of the docking stations on Gray’s Inn Road. They are sitting, talking and peddling, as if the bikes are exercise bikes in a gym. I join this impromptu stationary social cycling group. The couple I talk to are in their mid forties. They say they have never cycled but are “interested” and are just “giving it a go”. They explain how they learned to adjust the seat height and are getting “a feel for the bikes”. Even without becoming a member or riding the bikes, here the scheme is providing an interesting and unique introduction to cycling the city.