Cyclogeography (2 page)

By the 1950s, these radical pedestrian impulses had been channelled into the loosely defined notion of ‘psychogeography’, a term coined by the sociologist Guy Debord and derived from his investigations with the
Situationist Internationale
, an avant-garde revolutionary group which organised various subversive happenings in mid-century Paris. Psychogeography was both a political call to arms and an urban thesis. It described both a mode of existing within the city and a methodology for researching it. At the heart of psychogeography was the practice of what Debord called the
dérive
, the ‘drift’, which he defined in his essay ‘Theory of the Dérive’ as ‘a technique of passage through varied ambiances’. ‘In a dérive,’ Debord wrote:

For Debord, the
dérive
was a journey conducted on a whim, but it wasn’t quite aimless. Although they may have been undirected, these walks were constrained in other ways: governed by arbitrary rubrics imposed in order to generate unlooked for surprises. The Situationists used maps of Paris to navigate Berlin, they followed psychologically resonant ambiences in the urban fabric, they drew crude symbols onto their maps of the city and went out to walk and document the routes those symbols described. Walking was the favoured mode of transport. From these journeys it was hoped might emerge, writes the archmagus of London psychogeography, the writer Iain Sinclair, ‘dynamic shapes, with ambitions to achieve a life of their own, quite independent of their supposed author. Railway to pub to hospital: trace the line on the map. These botched runes, burnt into the script in the heat of creation, offer an alternative reading – a subterranean, preconscious text capable of divination and prophecy.’

Removed from the ‘usual motives for movement’ the psychogeographer was free to get lost in the stimulating
Gesamtkunstwerk
of the modern city, losing him or herself in the process, becoming one with tarmac and glass and steel. These journeys were neither work
nor
leisure, therefore, but psychic
research
. Debord imagined a time when people could be liberated from their intelligences and sensibilities so as to be released as aimless particles in urban space, to be blown where
they may by the winds of association, set free to hunt for the hidden ‘fissures in the urban network’ as they went. In doing so they could, he thought, transcend the linearity of both the map and of the commute, uncovering a realm of unconsciously registered connections and ambiences as they went.

Walking was good enough for Debord, but the bike, which came to maturity alongside the modern city, and which would seem to have been an obvious vehicle for him to make use of, was nowhere to be seen in the writings of the psychogeographers. In her ‘Manifesto á Velo’, the Mexican writer Valeria Luiselli recognises this lapse, arguing that the bicycle should be reclaimed from the single-issue fanatics – from the cycle couriers, commuters, rickshaw drivers and, above all, lycra-clad racing cyclists, who so often give it a bad name – and used as a tool for a purer form of urban exploration. ‘Riding a bicycle is one of the few street activities that can still be thought of as an end in itself,’ she writes:

The longer I worked as a bicycle courier, the more I realised that the freedom of the
cycleur
– a pedalling equivalent of the
flâneur
– was implicit in the story of the bicycle itself. The history of cycling is the history of the modern landscape. Since their invention in the mid-Victorian era, bicycles have been associated with freedom, allowing previously immobile groups of people to become self-propelled and socially mobile, to discover the landscapes they inhabit. It has been said that the bicycle did more for the gene pool than the railways, allowing – perhaps for the first time in human history – the poor to leave their villages and mix with their near-neighbours. The bike was the first technology of mass mobilisation. It is a nostalgic technology but it is also forward-looking, utopian and hybrid, tempered both by the backward glances of a pastoral cycling tradition and by the mad futurist visions of F. T. Marinetti, Samuel Beckett and Flann O’Brien. The bike is a technology of Man fused with machine, but also of machine communing with landscape.

As Luiselli and Fournel argue, the lack of representation of the bicycle in travel writing is surprising, then, especially as there does seem to be something inherently literary about the act of cycling. Both cycling and writing are self-directed activities. If you stop working, you stop moving. The verb ‘to spin’ used to refer to the making of thread from fibre: spinning yarn on a wheel. Later it was applied to the motion of the wheel itself, and eventually the metaphor came full
circle, describing the way in which stories themselves are told: spinning a yarn, stitching together a series of observations into one continuous, unbroken narrative. Cycling, like writing, forces you to think not just in terms of individual steps but in terms of conjunctions, routes and structures: how am I to get from here to there? How exactly will I navigate this particular snarl of metal and rubber and steel and chromium? How will I get to the end?

The rhythms of movement provided by cycling seem perfectly suited to the writer’s need to notice. At bicycle-speed your eyes focus on a single scene as you glide past, and for a few seconds you can isolate one incident before you’re rolled onward. Then on to the next. The saccades of the eye’s-snatch-and-focus synchronise with your velocity, flicking from rubbish bin to lamppost, from bus swerving out in front of you to pedestrian about to cross the road behind. The bicycle provides a road’s-eye view midway between the ponderous bus-gaze and the start/stop stress of the car. Driving, in the city at any rate, is binary, reverential, distancing. Cycling flows, converting static and isolated glimpses of the city into a moving, zoetropic flicker of life.

Finally, cycling is instinctive, making you
feel
a landscape rather than merely seeing it. By bike your environment writes itself onto your body. ‘Certain configurations of field, road, weather and smell,’ writes the historian Graham Robb, ‘imprint themselves on
the cycling brain with inexplicable clarity and return sometimes years later to pose their nebulous questions. A bicycle unrolls a 360-degree panorama of the land, allows the rider to register its gradual changes in gear ratios and muscle tension, and makes it hard to miss a single inch of it, from the tyre-lacerating suburbs of Paris to the Mistral-blasted plains of Provence.’

Urban cyclists live in Euclidian cities, hidden to others, cities made up of inclines and angles, curves and cambers. Almost unconsciously cycling uncovers the deeper and older structures of a landscape than car or train travel can. ‘The itinerary of a cyclist,’ Robb continues, ‘recreates, as if by chance, much older journeys: transhumance trails, Gallo-Roman trade routes, pilgrim paths, river confluences that have disappeared in industrial wasteland, valleys and ridge roads that used to be busy with pedlars and migrants.’ Sometimes getting on a bike can feel like a kind of time-travel. The needs of the cyclist – gentle inclines, quiet roads, protection from the wind – have more in common with those of cattle drivers or pilgrims than they do with most contemporary travellers. We seek the same routes.

Despite the inherent constraints of the courier’s journeys, therefore, after a while I realised that the job could provide just as liberating a way of encountering urban space as walking could. After a few months on the road as a courier I began to think of each run as a
dérive
, and each day’s work as an act of cyclogeography.
My life as a courier became a hymn to measurement. Distance travelled equalled money earned. Calorific intake (measured in ‘burger units’, the international scale of energy: 5,000 calories for a hard day’s pedalling, half that for a slow one) and effort expended tallied with monetary remuneration.

True, my journeys weren’t completely arbitrary, conducted according to the artifices and rituals of psychogeographic attraction. As a courier your journeys are never really your own. They are the products of trade rather than leisure. Nor were they particularly symbolic or mystical. I didn’t inscribe abstract shapes onto the map and pedal them out, or attempt to follow any significant or resonant routes. And yet they were equally dependent on happenstance. Unlike the
flâneur
’s unfocused yet reverential strolls, my journeys were conducted at the whims of capitalism and guided by the decisions of my controllers, articulated on the tarmac by the instinctive gestures of body and bicycle. Though my journeys were imposed from above they were still unauthored. Or rather, perhaps, it was better to think of the city authoring these journeys itself: writing them through a confluence of economic demand and the curious idiosyncrasies of the post-code system.

By Friday of a working week, after cycling three hundred miles or so, I found my bicycle had bled into my being, infecting me with its surfaces of leather and steel. Its chromium forks thrummed in sympathy
with my heart rate. The cadence of my pedal strokes corresponded with my breathing. I began to feel better on the bike than off it. When I stopped cycling, when I got off the bike at the end of a week’s work, the memory of the miles covered was registered in the stiffness of my legs, in the weariness of my arms, in the cramps which twitched and danced their way across my calves. The city itself persisted only as a series of brief snap-shots, stills from a film that lay inert until animated again by the flicker of pedal and wheel.

I
n order to survive a week on the road, in order to make any money at all as a courier, you need to wear the right clothing. In the heroic era of bicycle road racing, during the first few decades of the twentieth century, riders used raw steaks slipped down their shorts as cushions to ease the pain of bumpy roads: sacrificial flesh to cool their seeping wounds. It was a macabre but necessary treatment. The health of the backside is of the utmost importance to the long-distance cyclist. Races are won or lost over the condition of a rider’s arse. ‘The cyclist’s derrière,’ writes Paul Fournel:

It’s Friday morning and I’m getting ready for the day’s work. I put on a woollen cycling jersey and pull on my shoes, still slightly damp from the previous day’s rain. Outside, a woman throws batches of sodden bread from her balcony. Pigeons wheel in to feed. I drink a pint of milk and turn on the radio attached to the bag strap that runs like a bandoleer across my chest. I don’t talk into it yet – this time is still my own – but its gentle burble of static and talk breaks the silence.

I leave my house in a daze, more body than mind. The cleats on the stiff soles of my cycling shoes clatter on the concrete. They impose a flat-footed slap and shuffle on my gait, and I’ll feel awkward until I start to ride. Four days’ work have taken their toll on my legs. My knees creak and click. Long-term cycling is a demonstration of Cartesian dualism. Some days feel better than others, with my legs prepared to do what’s asked of them by my mind. On others they protest at every turn of the cranks and only begrudgingly respond.

My bicycle is a simple manifestation of the basic mechanics of cycling. It has a steel frame, one gear, and a single brake, like a child’s drawing of a bike. Steel is the best material for comfortable daily riding. It’s more flexible than aluminium, soaking up bumps in the roads, and is less liable than carbon fibre to fail catastrophically.

My bicycle is a fixed-gear track bike, meaning that there is no freewheel mechanism and thus no coasting, only the continuing turn of pedal and wheel. It’s
a setup designed for racing round a velodrome, and it allows you to adjust your speed with some subtlety – useful for cycling in heavy traffic, where any misjudged yank of a brake might get you rear-ended. The very first Tours de France were ridden on bicycles like this one, and the riders had to get off and flip their wheels over when they reached the tops of the mountains in order to select a higher gear for the descent. But the on-going revolutions of leg and pedal are tiring. Every inch of travel will be accounted for; every foot advanced along the tarmac will be recorded on my legs.

The story goes that track bikes were first used on the city streets by Jamaican couriers in New York, who had grown up riding them. Some fixed-gear cyclists ride without brakes and speak breathlessly about the poetry of such movement, of the way it forces you to anticipate the decisions of other road users, the way it encourages you to look into the future. They say they feel more connected with the road on such machines, but going brakeless has never really appealed to me. You get through too much tyre rubber. My handlebars are narrow and high, allowing me to slip through the smallest of gaps in the traffic and providing an upright riding position the better to survey the road around me.

I bought this bike from a man who’d loaded a van and driven around Italy buying up vintage frames from Italian cycling clubs. It was once beautiful – a sleek racehorse built for the velodromes near Treviso – but it has taken plenty of knocks over the years. The
front wheel has developed a slight wobble; a memory of an encounter with a taxi door that opened on me as I raced down Savile Row in the wet and couldn’t stop in time. A wheel is a delicately balanced object, held together only by the equal and sympathetic tension of the spokes, and you can always feel when it goes out of kilter. Uneven tension strains the spokes, and every so often one will pop as I ride along, so I carry a quiver of spares in my bag.

The top tube of my frame, running from saddle to handlebars, has a ding in the paintwork from where the bars swing round and bang against it when I dismount. A few years ago I replaced the down-tube after a series of collisions stressed the steel and caused it to crack beneath the lugs. I didn’t paint it, and now the steel has rusted. When it rains, orange streaks of rusty water splatter against my legs. Like the ship of Theseus, it is hard to know whether this is still the same bike I began riding when I started this work. I’ve gone through innumerable wheel sets and handlebar grips and cranks and cogs and chainrings and chains over the years. I’ve killed several expensive sealed bottom brackets, quickly slain by winter’s grit and salt. Only the saddle has remained the same.

Cadence. The first pedal strokes of the day. Potential energy, provided by the trade-off between the weight of my body and gravity, overcomes the inertia of my
wheels and the friction of rubber on tarmac. Momentum builds. The gentle swishing that accompanied the first few revolutions becomes a faint friction-roar as the rubber of my tyres lifts itself from the dry surface of the road and falls back down again in front, over and over. Only half an inch or so of rubber is ever in contact with the road at any time. Chain is paid out in its endless loop around sprocket and chainring, matching the distance covered by the wheel precisely, revolution by revolution. There are 49 teeth on my chainring and 17 on my cog. If I pedal one hundred revolutions per minute I travel at a speed of 20 miles per hour. For every full pedal stroke I move 17 feet along the road. The mathematics of the bicycle measures the city turn by turn.

At 8.30 a.m., Old Street is clogged with other cyclists. Lycra-clad bankers head into the City on their carbon-framed racers, wobbly commuters on Boris bikes hug the gutter. Suited Brompton riders glide through the gaps. Graphic designers and web developers, bound for Soho, drift by on their track bikes, studiously ignoring everyone else. The number of cyclists on London’s streets follows the seasons, mushrooming in the summer but shrinking away in winter or on rainy days when only the hardy soloists remain.

I join the peloton, attacking when I see a gap until I’ve moved to the front of the bunch. I cast a wide loop around a pedestrian on a zebra crossing, grabbing the side of a bus to pull myself through a gap. I weave
between the taxis that are cruising the road in search of fares. Cycling in traffic like this is an opportunistic business, part instinct and part analysis. You have to move from gap to gap, navigating the flow of traffic with the detached concentration of a boulderer addressing a climbing problem.

At the lights the exhaust of a bus blasts my feet like the warm nuzzling of some enormous dog. The aerial of my radio sticks out from the strap of my bag at an angle and extends for a few inches beyond my shoulder, functioning like a cat’s whiskers, alerting me to the width of gaps as I squeeze through them. My shoulders are no wider than my handlebars, so I know that if I can fit them through then the rest of my body will follow.

Out in the streets things feel oceanic. Mist hangs over the city. Buildings, built to an industrial rather than a human scale, stand by like indifferent reefs or
hulking sunken ships. Taxis shark through the lanes, darting out between the rows of cars and pulling their unpredictable U-turns. The airbrakes of buses groan like the cries of whales.

In his short story ‘Waiting’, the novelist and psychogeographer Will Self describes a visionary motorbike courier, Carlos, who becomes a mystic diviner of the tarmac, able to cast calculations on the road and discern the state of traffic across the entire city as he goes. ‘At every juncture where there was an opportunity for a choice,’ Self writes, ‘he took the right one. Carlos had not only apprehended every road, he had anticipated every alleyway, every mews, every garage forecourt and the position and synchronisation of every traffic light. He could not possibly know what he seemed to know – the only way he could have seen the route we took was from the air, and even then he would have had to have made constant trigonometric calculations to figure out the angles we seemed to have followed intuitively.’ Carlos is able to assess the flow of the whole body of the city by observing its movement at any one point. ‘Take me to any street, any street in London whatsoever where there is a constant traffic stream and just by looking at it I can know the state of every other road in the city. Then there’s no waiting. You understand? I never have to wait.’

Cycle couriering grants access to something resembling
this secret knowledge of the city, to this sense of never having to wait. Though I’d lived in London all my life, until I began working as a courier I never quite realised how it all fits together. My experience of London had been of a fragmented, disconnected city composed of a series of separate parts, each surrounding an isolated tube station or bus stop. Because of its scale and lack of centralised plan, London has always resisted the ownership of the gaze. It’s too vast to be seen from any single point; too fragmented to be reduced to a predictable series of sectors or
arrondissements
. No Haussmann has ever succeeded in standardising its layout. At street level it remains untamed, which makes it difficult to map.

Many people, even life-long Londoners, don’t really know the city they live in. They have vague notions of east and west, of north and south. They associate certain areas with certain activities – work and leisure, home and away – but they are isolated from the whole by London’s scale, and by those mediating technologies through which they generally encounter it: screens and maps and the public transport networks which conspire to divorce people from places. Conditioned by these ways of encountering the city, before I became a courier I had only vague notions of its topography. London had been for me an archipelago of concrete islands, but couriering drained the ocean between them, drawing the map together in my mind.

The first courier company that would give me a job without any experience was a desperate outfit based in a railway arch in Hoxton, just about clinging on amongst the graphic designers and internet entrepreneurs which have come to dominate the area. Fleetway Flyers consisted of two men who sat in their squalid office issuing edicts to a ragged band of riders through an aging Bakelite microphone. Trevor owned the operation and Frank did the controlling. Frank was an Irishman with a lilting voice, Trevor a myopic old cockney.

The yellowed, curling map of London pinned to the wall of the office was rarely consulted. Day after day the runs remained the same. Fossilised routes were trailed in greasy fingermarks across the battered
A–Z
that lived in the office, and carved into the brains of the regular riders like paths across a muddy field. For most of the day Trevor and Frank sat doing the
Sun
crossword and drinking instant coffee from Styrofoam cups which they’d slowly nibble to pieces, interrupted only by the occasional trilling of the phones. In the afternoon Trevor would go out and lose money on the horses.

My colleagues at Fleetway were a diverse bunch, but they all had their reasons for being there. Like running away to sea, or joining the circus, couriering can appeal, as it did for me, as a mild act of rebellion. Others worked the circuits because they had to. You don’t need to speak very good English to be a bicycle
courier, and so the workforce is composed largely of economic migrants, attracted by the lax fiscal scrutiny and flexible working hours. As long as the packages got delivered then the controllers had little interest in who did the delivering. When one courier got deported another would silently inherit his bicycle and call sign – a number used to identify a rider out on the road – only a slightly modulated accent over the radio betraying the change.

Most couriers are young, male, and slightly lost. There are a few older riders, career couriers, but most do the job only for a few years in their twenties, before thinking about exit strategies in their thirties. Many are overeducated for the job yet unwilling, for whatever reason, to commit to a regular nine-to-five existence. Some have other projects to attend to – they’re writers, artists or actors – and the flexibility of the work allows them to pursue these callings on their own terms.

But the mobile nature of the workforce attracts drifters too, people unequipped or unwilling to do other kinds of work. In
Tropic Of Capricorn
, Henry Miller’s account of working as a controller for the ‘Cosmodemonic Telegraph Company of America’ – a lightly fictionalised version of Western Union, where Miller worked for years before becoming a novelist – he describes the bulk of the messengers he employed as ‘driftwood’, temporary workers ready to be sacrificed on the altar of the American labour market.