Cyclogeography (6 page)

A few years ago I heard that a courier had committed suicide after having been stopped for running a red light. The cursory name check the police ran revealed an unpaid debt in Poland and a one-year prison sentence passed in absentia. Faced with deportation, with the loss of a life struggled for and cultivated into stability, he killed himself. He left behind his girlfriend and their young daughter.

London writers have always been drawn to the idea of hard work in a city that seems ever more dependent on brainwork. As manual labour in the city has declined, so writers have become interested in cataloguing and recording the work of the body. By George Orwell’s time there was already, he wrote, a ‘sort of fetish of manual work’ abroad in the city:

Much London writing has been obsessed with the secret history of working places, with the stories of those labouring shades who once walked and lived and worked in them. Often this interest was based on hands-on experience. Charles Dickens worked in a blacking factory as a child, a period in his life he remained deeply ashamed of. In
London Labour and the London Poor
Henry Mayhew outlined a fine-grained typology of work in the city, identifying the various castes of workers who used to keep London functioning: the mudlarks, costermongers, scavengers, and ‘wandering tribes’ who plied their trades on the streets of the city. In distinguishing the ‘wanderers and the settlers’, Mayhew wrote, ‘the nomad is then distinguished from the civilised man by his repugnance to regular and continuous labour – by his want of providence in laying up a store for the future – by his inability to perceive consequences ever so slightly removed from immediate apprehension – by his passion for stupefying herbs and roots and, where possible, for intoxicating fermented liquors – by his extraordinary powers of enduring privation – by his comparative insensibility to pain.’ It is a fair description of the cycle courier.

More recently, in the work of authors like Iain Sinclair, Peter Ackroyd and Rachel Lichtenstein, the idea of work as a part of the identity of urban space
still seems to be central. Yet the impulse to account for this lost labour is in some respects an attempt to address the new blandness that lies at the heart of the contemporary city, with its economy dominated by service industry jobs. The labour-fetishism of much London writing has itself been diagnosed as the nostalgic result of the decline of manual labour in the city, and of the architecture associated with it: with the docks and the factories which were once London’s biggest employers. In
London from Punk to Blair
Phil Baker argues that the notion of a secret city, lying parallel to the one most of us know, has always inspired London writers, but that:

The writer James Heartfield argues that the manual labourer now forms part of a secret lost race of ‘troglodytes’ that haunt the contemporary city ‘cleared away in the transformation of London into a city dedicated
primarily to business services and retail’. Such nostalgia is symptomatic of a larger cultural project, represented in the work-porn of television programmes such as
Deadliest Catch
and
Trawlermen
, documenting hard work and its associated dangers for our voyeuristic pleasure.

Now cycle couriering too is implicated in this decline, and is increasingly seen as a dying trade. The narrative is familiar to all couriers, whether they subscribe to it or not. Since the advent of fax and email couriers have been living at the end of days. The bike, once the ‘friend of the poor’ and the ‘ally of their effort’ is losing its proletarian edge. It has been re-appropriated, not as a tool for work but as a vehicle for leisure.

Of course, regardless of the politics, everyone
should
be cycling more, and driving less. The notion that cycling is or should be the preserve of a dwindling and ‘authentic’ courier crowd, let alone that of the Critical Mass riders, naked cyclists and bikepunks who see each revolution of the wheel as one more turn towards the greater revolution, is as alienating as it is wrong-headed. But on the final reckoning bike politics doesn’t amount to much of anything. The fact is that most working people still prefer the underground. The cult of simplicity surrounding cycling has corresponded exactly to the decline of public infrastructure that most people use to get to work. Indeed in most cities the bicycle selfishly profits from this decline, gaining an advantage as traffic snarls up and trains fill up.

The central paradox of the labour of cycle couriering, therefore, is its strangely oppressive freedom. Many couriers revel in the fact that they can come and go as they please, that they work alone in the city on their own terms, that they can wear what they like and drink, smoke and take drugs all day without getting sacked. In reality of course you’re the lowest in the economic food chain - capitalism’s foot-soldiers, paid to pass the parcel around a massive financial circuit. And yet still the meteoric rise of the bicycle, reclaimed not as a tool of work but of leisure, continues. In an age of austerity, the underground systems of London and New York are literally grinding towards collapse. Meanwhile for a politician eager for popularity, nothing is easier than taking a can of paint and siphoning off a portion of tarmac for a bike lane. The class of people this pleases is small but increasingly vocal, highly visible in parts of the city where they were once scarce and oblivious to what was once a truth: increased cycling is a sign of decreased employment. When a bike shop appears in a depressed neighbourhood, you can be sure it’s on the verge of gentrification.

Where I live in east London, the bicycle shop has become a destination in itself. Boutique bike shops serve coffee and cake whilst the mechanics, stars of the show, fix bicycles in the middle of the room while everyone watches. The nostalgia can also be seen in the bikes people choose to ride. In the ’90s, Bill tells me, most couriers rode fat-tubed mountain bikes bristling
with gears. Now there’s been a turn towards the simple honesty of the fixed-gear track bicycle, with its single gear, its perpetually revolving pedals, its decent and uncluttered lack of brakes. Leather saddles riveted together with copper pins adorn these simple machines. People carry waxed cotton saddlebags. Lycra is banished to the lower layers. Out on the streets faux-couriers, dressed the part, cruise around on spotless steel track bikes, carrying enormous single-strap bags and wearing their bonsai cycling caps. But their bags are empty. They carry no radios. They wear the bottoms of their trousers rolled.

O
n his last day of work my brother, who also worked as a bicycle courier, organised a race. Courier races, known as alleycats, usually consist of straightforward if manic runs across the city. An anarchic peloton will gather at some anonymous starting point before the riders commence on a mad dash from checkpoint to checkpoint, crashing through the traffic as a wave of rubber and steel. It’s a fairly antisocial pursuit. Alleycats are parodies of the courier’s day-job, ritualistic recreations of working journeys. They are utterly devoid of purpose. Sometimes alleycats are organised around a theme. Sometimes there are prizes, but mostly you compete for reputation. Racers collect spoke cards commemorating races they have completed in, which they wear as trophies stuck between their spokes.

When I first became a courier, most of these races began at the Foundry, a punky, ramshackle pub
on Great Eastern Street. The Foundry was a bastion of cheap booze and anarcho-aestheticism set in the heart of Shoreditch, and was for a long time the last outpost of the underground in an area that had long ago lost its battle against gentrification. In its previous life the building had been a bank, and the vault was later used to stage exhibitions. Layers of graffiti covered every inch of the toilets. By night avant-garde jazz bands twanged their makeshift instruments in the gloom. Couriers tested the tolerance of the landlords by smuggling in their own cans of beer, but they were never barred.

My brother’s race was different to the average alleycat. It was designed as an urban steeplechase with a fox-hunt theme. He strapped a huge bottle to his back containing a few gallons of paint, with a pipe running down the frame of his bicycle, terminating in a small tap. He attached a fox’s tail to one of his belt loops. At the start of the race he opened the tap and the paint started to flow as he pedalled off into the traffic, a line of white glistening on the tarmac in his wake. After a few minutes I released the racers – a pack of bicycling-hounds – with a blast of horns. The race was on.

We followed the paint that lay in a splattered line on the tarmac, competing with the other street markings and tracing a ghostly outline of my brother’s journey. Like a paint-walk by the Belgian artist Francis Alÿs, the drips and splashes wrote the race onto the street. It recorded the positions of cars and buses as
they had been a few minutes earlier, swerving erratically around now non-existent obstructions. It registered the ghostly outlines of the lines of traffic idling at the lights; elongated, swooping curves as my brother had cut between moving cars. It recorded his speed also. There were larger spaces between the splatters when he’d gone faster, smaller ones as he’d slowed down.

At one junction the line of paint led onto the pavement, across some blue duckboards and dropped back onto the road. Some racers followed the route blindly. Other, cannier riders spotted the line continuing further up the road and carried straight on, avoiding the now pointless detour. The hounds whooped and cheered. One fell off his bike and was left behind. Like a manic pied-piper, my brother led the pack of cyclists around the East End of London, through kissing gates, across parks and across industrial wasteland, over the shifting pavé of old cobbled streets and down the dark tunnels that run under the railway lines around Brick Lane.

After a while the splashes became irregular. The paint was running out, or the pipe was blocking up. As the pack crossed Bethnal Green Road for the second time we spotted a big splatter of paint in the gutter. My brother had slipped on a drain cover and buckled both his wheels. The race was over, and the riders skulked back to the pub. The white line can still be made out here and there on the roads around Brick Lane, a faint memorial to the route.

Around the same time I started couriering I became obsessed with bicycle road racing. I wasn’t so much interested in the modern sport, in the world of carbon, titanium and doping scandals, but in stories from the dawn of bike racing in the early twentieth century, when riders were responsible for their own repairs and the only rules about doping were that drugs would not be supplied by the organisers.

In these races the image of the rider’s body as a machine reached its apogee. Doping was rife. Early riders of the Tour used alcohol and ethanol to dull the pain of pushing their bodies to breaking point. In the six-day track races which were popular from the 1890s to the 1920s – races that wore riders down to inhuman lumps of twitching muscle – seconds used strychnine to tighten muscles, nitro-glycerine to terrify their rider’s hearts into pushing on. Later amphetamine and cocaine tinctures became prevalent. In 1924 the cyclist Henri Pélissier gave an interview in which he described the regime he and his fellow riders underwent during big races:

The professional peloton is a place of applied suffering. Though a bicycle race is a communal endeavour, you don’t only race against other riders, though you do do this, but against yourself and the terrain you ride over. ‘During the big races,’ writes James Waddington in
Bad to the Bone
, a novel about murder in the peloton:

As spectators we consume the riders. Following the Tour, being a cycling fan, is a more intrusive form of fandom than that of most other sports. Racers submit to the gaze of the team manager, the coach, the
directeur sportif.
They do what they are told both on and off the bike. Cycling fans are themselves vampiric, suckling on the smallest titbits of information, condemning their heroes for doping on the smallest pieces of evidence. Cycling geeks read about the training regimes of their heroes, following weight fluctuations with all the dedication of
Daily Mail
journalists. Output and performance are measured in mechanical terms: in wattage and time.

There is a typology of cyclists’ bodies which as a cycling fan you learn to interpret. The best climbers are birdlike creatures: hollow-boned and covered with a taught carapace of nerve and gristle, no extraneous bulk to speak of, which is all so much extra baggage. Sprinters are solid lumps of twitch muscle. Not over-bulked, not too lean, the time-trial specialist is a monotony artist. The best all round racers have the hypnotic ability to get into a rhythm and grind on and on, over any surface, for any amount of time.

The legibility of cyclists’ bodies is apparent both to fans and to other riders. Gino Bartali – Italy’s most famous pre-Second World War racing cyclist – used to instruct one of his team mates to watch the legs of his arch-rival, Fausto Coppi, and shout ‘the vein’ whenever an artery on Coppi’s leg bulged, indicating that he was under duress. Then he would attack. Those massive varicosed legs, the products of years of doping, made Coppi’s body as legible as a road-map, with its purple and green ribbons and its dendritic culs-de-sac.

You don’t have to be an athlete to be a bicycle courier, but a few messengers have gone on to become professional racing cyclists. Graeme Obree – ‘the Flying Scotsman’ – worked as a courier in Edinburgh for a few years before he broke the hour record for cycling the furthest distance around a track in one hour on a bike he’d made himself from washing machine parts. Then there’s the story of Nelson Vails, a New York messenger who went on to win a silver medal at
the 1984 Olympic games before travelling to Japan to become a professional Kierin racer in the velodromes there. With stories like these there is just enough of a precedent to make us dream that we, too, might one day break away and join the peloton.

Evening was falling, and sun shone through the streets of Soho. People were leaving their offices. Packs of suited workers flowed through the square, en route to hitting the bars. Bears embraced on Great Compton Street. Girls tottered down the street, arm in arm. White van men tooted their horns at all comers, Friday night lairy.

Meanwhile, couriers were flocking to Soho Square like starlings coming in to roost. A murmuration of cyclists circled the square a few times before coming to rest, doing self-conscious laps, weaving between the walkers before leaning forward over their handlebars and skidding to a stop in long, drawn-out swerves, writing black rubber marks onto the tarmac. Others headed straight for the grass, dismounting their machines – leg over the handlebars in extended goose-steps – as they arrived by the gate, ghost-riding their bikes to a stop.

Most were there to drink, to wind down at the end of a week’s work. They skinned up spliffs in their cupped hands as though reading their own palms. Tattooed elbows rose and fell, wavelike, drinking in
unison. They spat phlegm from beneath their spumy beards. Dreadlocks flailed in the evening breeze. Flashing chrome, pierced ears. Bike-punk cyber men and women loafed on the grass in lively indifference.

There was a buzz in the air. People were excited. Tonight’s alleycat had been organised to raise money for a Dutch ex-messenger who had been diagnosed with cancer and wanted to visit his friends in Mexico one last time before he died. Simultaneous races were happening in cities across the world. It was the first race of the new season, and plenty of riders were itching to slough off the miseries of winter. They wanted to stretch their legs. All the old hands were there – Clarence, Darren, Mike, Simone. Over in the corner I spotted an obnoxious wild-man whose name I didn’t know, who crashed parties and started fights, ruining things and boring you with his inane stories. His ever-present hat sat at an angle he thought of as rakish; his mouth with its tombstone teeth cracked into a permanent grin.

A group of younger riders were there too, most of whom I didn’t recognise. There was a compact muscular man in a white cap riding a battered white bicycle with ‘Anchor’ written on the down-tube; a thin man with the bird-like body of a champion climber who was riding a geared time-trial bike; a thick-set sprinter on a pristine track bike. The man in the white cap said he had been a courier for a while a few years ago, but had grown bored of the work and had left. He wanted
to join the army, he said, but he still came out to race every now and then. Alleycats are difficult things to give up.

As the sun set those who were planning to race eyed each other up surreptitiously. ‘How are the legs?’ we asked each other. ‘I must have done about eighty miles today, so we’ll see.’ We hedged our bets. We talked ourselves down. No one wanted to come across as cocky. No one wanted to leave themselves open for an attack.

Beside me on the grass riders tinkered with their bicycles. A woman was fiddling with her wheels, tightening one spoke after another as though tuning a harp, until they pulled against each other in perfect, equal, tension. Someone else was fixing a puncture. I watched him expertly strip the tyre off, as though he was gutting a fish, peeling it off from around the rim of the wheel with a bent spoon. Once it lay open in front of him he pumped up the inner tube slightly, passing it across his lips to feel for the hole from which the air was escaping. Having located it he rubbed some vulcanising solution onto the rubber and waited for it to take effect. He placed a patch over the hole and massaged it into place. Once it had set he reassembled the tyre before fitting his wheel back onto his bike. The whole operation took seven minutes. You can do it in three if you carry a spare tube.

People stood around, drinking and smoking and doing track stands and wheelies and skids on their
bikes. Others did laps of the square. People checked their bikes like ostlers checking the teeth and hooves of horses. They consulted their maps. They spoke excitedly about the race. I ate a banana. I tightened my chain and examined the sprocket on my back wheel. I knew it was fine: I’d worked on it all week, but I did it anyway as something to do.

The race was due to start at eight, but one and a half hours later we were still waiting. ‘It’s better to start later,’ said Clarence, ‘when it’s dark. Then we can really own the streets’. Clarence is one of those haunting presences in the city. No one knows where he lives. He drifts across town from sofa to sofa, living out of his bag, moving across town in a slower, more drawn-out version of his daily working migrations.

Eventually the checkpoint marshals moved off to take up their positions. No one, apart from the organisers and the marshals, knew what the route of the race would be. The race was a blank space on the map ready to be filled, a known unknown. In most alleycat races there’s no set route. You’re given the first check-point, and must find your way there as quickly as possible. Get to the first checkpoint and you’re given the address of the next one. Get there and move on to the next.

Eventually the organiser, John, assembles the racers and gives us a quick briefing. It’s dusk by now. He tells
us the Tour de Soho will be a gruelling ride, but not a long race. ‘It’s going to be quick. There are prizes for first to third place. It’s a point-to-point run, but you will need an
A–Z
. The first checkpoint is on the corner of Northdown Street and Pentonville Road, at the bottom of the hill. Go!’

A Le Mans start. A scrum of bicycles and people. We run over to the pile of bikes and try to untangle them as quickly as possible before leaving the square. Bemused Friday night drinkers stand by watching. There’s no time to cheer. I nod to Clarence and we jump over the wall next to the lawn on which we’ve assembled, grab our bikes, and run to the gate.