On your bike, Sinclair

I am reading The Last London. I am trying, faithfully, to enjoy it; to wrap my head around the way Sinclair’s territory wraps around himself. I enjoy, after examination, the segments where Sinclair dissects the changing face of London, irrevocably altered by migration, different kinds of waves, economic necessity and economic greed. His walks – often bolstered by their aimless quality – encapsulate a newfound ethos in the latter-day capital: people feel lost. London’s minorities written out of its history. London’s homeless ignored, no matter how they seek to cry for attention. Walking through a park and feeling alone, upon remarking that the place is “a site of elective infantilism: mature adults on psychedelic skateboards bopping to earworm infills”. “Cell phones cancel surrounds in their addiction to a false intimacy”.

I feel a generation (or more) divides myself from Sinclair, and I am an amateur of the trade he’s plied for fifty years: writing. But I sensed that generational gap in our respective words. I sensed it in his potentially misguided willingness to conflate “Chinese” investors with those from further afield for the sake of simplified comparisons with Trumpist asides. I sensed it in the labelling of his communicating brick  the “duncephone”, and total renunciation of any technology more powerful. And I sensed it more strongly than ever in his brutal take-downs of the taking up of cycling in London.

Sinclair has his reasons to hold cyclists in contempt. They make life on the canals of London harder than it needs to be, I’ll concede, especially when they are less than responsible. They don’t pay enough respect on shared pedestrian paths either. Cyclists, like motorists, are a variable breed; some are just as bad as the road-rage-addled window-winding-down disasters we’ve all experienced at least once. But an entrenched and perhaps overstated appreciation for the humble pedestrian sees Sinclair demonise, however sardonically, the blighty bike.

He says, areas where pedestrians and “considerate cyclists” share a space is “strategic post-truth signage”. He calls Victoria Park cyclists the “peloton express”, “Canary Wharf mercenaries” making “grunts of entitlement”. He believes “the peloton stamped, wheel to wheel, without compassion or respect for regulations”. That serious cyclists are vagrants to be despised.

I can’t sympathise with Sinclair on this. For one, cycling and walking don’t exist at loggerheads; people rarely choose between one and the other. Rather, a cyclist is a would-be passenger on public transport, or worse yet, in a private automobile. To lament bustling bike lanes is not to acknowledge the passing of the walkers. You can have both. Moreover, an astute rider can frequently mirror the walker in their experience of place. There are even some parts of the built environment a cyclist understands better: the horror of merging lanes of traffic, or the way one-way systems and give-way markers disrupt and rearrange neighbourhoods. And they are always more conscious and close-knit to their territory than their car-bound cousins. They muddle through particulate mist. They hear linden trees in the wind. They are pedestrians with speed and pride of place on the ultimate dividing line: tarmac // pavement. Cyclists are a vital component in placemaking, as the most aware actors occupying road space beyond the paved pedestrian hegemony.

In an interview with “give it to me straight like a pear cider that’s made with 100% pears” Stewart Lee, this argument was further put out to air, and the frustrating whiteness of cyclists in the capital was also stressed. Cycling in the UK has had an image problem for some time, since it ceased to be a working class pursuit. This history needs to be challenged so the future can be changed. The disadvantaged and discouraged need to feel welcome to join Sinclair’s wretched “peloton”, so that it can become slower, safer and ultimately popular. Trying to push cycling away, and suggesting that it is inimical to positive, lived city experience, is insincere. Not that Sinclair or his “duncephone” would know, but it’s much harder to be consumed by the digital world when you’re riding a bike. It demands your attention. And so do the roads you cycle down. Sinclair is right, following his diatribe, to consult Jon Day, author of Cyclogeography: Journeys of a London Bicycle Courier. His experience, expressing ecstasy and hardship through a courier’s career in placemaking, is proof in the pudding. “cyclogeography” – beyond its esoteric phrasing – is a valuable component of literary experience of place. And if, as Sinclair suggests, psychogeography has “outlived its usefulness and become a brand”, maybe cyclogeography can plug that pataphysical puncture. On your duncebike, Sinclair.