Cyclogeography (3 page)

We were a mixed bag at Fleetway, but most of us
were driftwood. Manuel had become a courier because he was on the run from the police in his native country and could get no other job without attracting undue attention. The work allowed him to maintain his copious and various drug addictions too, as he only had to appear sober for the few minutes he was inside buildings, face-to-face with receptionists, in order to pass. The wild-eyed stare and jittering tics he’d developed over the years could always be explained away to those he encountered on the road as the results of profound exhaustion: signatures of fatigue sympathetically awakened by the mechanisms of the city itself.

Markus had to be a courier. He was otherwise unemployable because he looked so frightening. His eyes bulged, his ham-like forearms flexed. Each of his thighs was like the belly of a foal. A fringe of ragged dreadlocks rimmed his head like a halo. The puckered kisses of numerous stab wounds ran across his torso and the varicose relief of bruise-coloured tattoos spidered over his arms and legs.

Mike had grown up on a Traveller site but had run away at sixteen and come to the city to seek his fortune. He rode a fixed-gear mountain bike with no brakes. He drank cider, and revelled in the YouTube footage of him pulling out one of his own rotten teeth with a pair of pliers. By night he organised raves on the foreshore of the Thames.

Christian Adam became a courier because it offered good opportunities for proselytising and pamphlet distribution,
and because he liked the image of bringing the good news by bicycle, one pedal stroke at a time. I asked him once about his evangelical faith and he told me he believed that he was part of the elect, and that it would therefore only be right of him to offer God the chance to take his life at least five times a day. He spoke about ‘the passion of the road’ and the ‘grace of traffic’, and rode with a glow-in-the-dark rosary dangling from his saddle. Standing by while waiting for work, he’d preach the Word. No one paid him much attention. He had left his young family behind in Poland, he told me once, and sent money back each week to pay off a loan he’d taken out to repair his parents’ home.

Bicycle couriering tends to attract the forgotten, people who have fallen through the cracks of the system: migrants flying under the radar; gentle, solitary alcoholics who pedal around with cans of Strongbow in their bidon holders; high-functioning smack-heads with their gap-toothed smiles and machine-gun badinage, who travel always with the animated shuffle of the addict looking for a fix. Some are merely dedicated cyclists unable to pursue a career in the professional racing peloton through lack of talent or dedication. But most are running away from something.

I became a courier not so much for economic reasons as for the other things it seemed to offer. I thought of myself as following George Orwell’s lead, gaining an understanding of hard work at the coalface of
capitalism in order to salve my conscience. I was beguiled by the wonderfully straightforward economies of the job. As a courier it is easy to see what, precisely, you are being paid to do: earnings are measured in miles – the distance theory of value. Carry a package from one postcode to another and you get paid accordingly. If it needs to go further or get there quickly you get paid a bit more.

Since their invention, bicycles have been used to carry messages. In Paris in the late nineteenth century men and boys on penny-farthings and velocipedes delivered cheques from bank to bank, or covered the final miles of a fledgling telegraph network, carrying messages from telegraph office to recipient. As the car came to dominate in cities the use of bicycle messengers waned slightly. But then traffic built up, and congestion slowed the car again. Nowadays, the average speed of traffic in London is the same as it was one hundred years ago – about 8 m.p.h., the speed of the horse. In the 1960s people began using bicycles to deliver packages in the city once again, and by the 1980s New York and London saw an explosion in bicycle couriers working the congested streets, competing with the other communication networks that were then emerging.

Nowadays, bicycle couriers carry everything and anything the city needs to function. Couriers carry physical objects that haven’t yet been replaced by images or data streams: bundles of legal papers tied together
with their jaunty pink ribbons; video tapes and DVDs from production companies to edit suites; jewellery and clothing samples from East End sweatshops to West End PR firms; blood and urine samples from hospital to hospital; contracts from production companies to talent holed up in Primrose Hill mansions; forgotten keys or mobile phones from pubs or strip-clubs to offices; congratulatory bottles of champagne from agents to the stage-doors of west end theatres. Sometimes you deliver to famous addresses: to 10 Downing Street, where you’re ushered through the gate and instructed to knock on the front door; to Tony Blair’s house, where armed policemen eye you suspiciously. I once carried a box of teabags from Fortnum & Mason to Buckingham Palace.

Then there are the shady jobs, conducted on behalf of London’s secret, underground economy, jobs you wouldn’t want to be stopped and searched carrying. At one company I worked for I was regularly asked to carry grubby wraps of coke picked up from flat-capped dealers outside pubs and delivered to suited bankers in the City (‘Don’t take it to the post room,’ the controllers would urge, ‘he’ll meet you outside’), or dodgy tickets from touts to clients. I carried envelopes stuffed with cash to pay off post-room managers in order to keep the contracts running. Other jobs were merely peculiar. One client used to send us to the Masons’ supply shops on Great Queen Street, opposite the Grand High Lodge, to collect insignia and strange ritualistic
objects for him: rectangular briefcases and tied aprons for delivery to anonymous suburban semis.

Sometimes couriers carry valuables. A controller once told me a story of a group of thieves who had bought themselves a radio tuned to the frequencies used by the courier companies. They’d wait on the side streets around Hatton Garden, the centre of London’s jewellery district, eavesdropping on jobs being picked up on the street. When they heard of a likely sounding job they’d arrive at the pickup before the courier could, dressed in appropriate clothing, and steal the package. Controllers are still jumpy about being overheard sending out big jobs over the radio, and so any explicit discussion of the value of a package is done by mobile phone.

Now the old hands say the heyday of the cycle courier is over. Before the internet you used to make £500 a week, they say. Easy. Shuttling tapes and ad-copy around London, keeping the whole monumental edifice running. The city fed on sweat, but it paid you for that sweat. In the ’80s and early ’90s there were maybe a thousand cycle couriers making a half decent living in London. But then the fax machines arrived, taking a chunk of that time-sensitive work, and then the Internet came along and ate into the rest. Still a few hundred couriers cling on, scraping a living alongside – or in spite of – the new networks that constantly threaten to replace them.

Nowadays couriers carry data as well, the capacity
of our bags having increased over and above the speed of the digital networks. Thirty years ago we might have carried the digital equivalent of a couple of megabytes of data in our bags. Now we can still, over short distances at any rate, carry information more quickly and cheaply than wires and fibre optic cables can. And so we carry hard drives and DVDs packed with terabytes of data, the inflation of storage capacity just about outstripping the available bandwidth of the networks.

At Fleetway my days would begin in Bunhill Fields, on the edge of the City of London. It was a good place to begin the day’s work: near the office in Hoxton, equidistant from the City circuits and those of the West End. It seemed, too, like an appropriate place from which to embark on my cyclogeographic investigations of the city. Many London writers are buried here: William Blake, Daniel Defoe, John Bunyan. Other journeys have started here, some more revolutionary than others. On 15 September 1784 the balloonist Vincenzo Lunardi made the first ascent in a helium balloon in England from what’s now the cricket ground of the Royal Artillery Company next door. His impatient audience, 200,000 strong, forced him to leave prematurely, without his co-pilot, and so he drifted north for 24 miles with only a cat and a dog for ballast and company before finishing his adventure at Standon Green End in Hertfordshire.

Nearly one hundred years after Lunardi, the gyroscopic miracle of the bicycle was first demonstrated to an incredulous London public just round the corner on Old Street. The writer John Mayall described the experience of witnessing this revolutionary trick of physics, in the
Ixion
, the sporting newspaper he edited:

This was the point at which, freed from the inelegant vibrations associated with the early hobbyhorses and chainless boneshakers, the bicycle proper could begin to establish itself as an efficient and practical alternative to the horse.

Inspired by the demonstration, the following day
Mayall borrowed Turner’s velocipede and took it to Portland Place where, over the course of a few hours, he taught himself to ride it. ‘Even nowadays the cycling novice requires plenty of room,’ wrote Charles G. Harper in his account of this, the first bicycle ride to be made on London’s streets, ‘and as Portland Place is well known to be the widest street in London, and nearly the most secluded, it seems probable that this intrepid pioneer deliberately chose it in order to have due scope for his evolutions.’ Later, after having learnt to stay upright, Mayall ‘lumbered into Regent’s Park, and so to the drinking fountain near the Zoological Gardens, where, in attempting to turn round, he fell over again. Mounting once more, he returned.’ After a while a park-keeper came to tell him off. ‘Thus early began the long warfare between Cycling and authority,’ Harper notes.

Bicycles would go on to democratise transport and establish themselves in the cultural imagination as symbols of freedom and self-reliance. John Keats (himself reputed to have been born just down the road form Bunhill Fields, on the site of what is now the Globe Inn) may have called the hobbyhorse the ‘ nothing of the day’, but only half a century later Turner’s pedal-driven velocipede had proved to be immensely popular with Londoners. By 1884 Michael Mulhill’s
Dictionary of Statistics
recorded 9,800 cyclists in London, thronging its parks and green spaces, wobbling down its streets and alleyways, flowing
through the arteries of the Victorian city. These days about half a million journeys are made by bicycle in London every day.

For the first ten minutes of the day I would sit next to the grave of John Bunyan, smoking cigarettes while listening to crackles from the radio as the circuits warmed up. Cycle couriers live as parasites on the city – skimming a living off the top of commercial exchange – and are parasitic on its architecture, too, and on the flow of its traffic. A bicycle is only faster than a car or motorbike across town because the roads are clotted with too many vehicles.

Couriers cling on because they are able to exist in the economic and architectural edgelands, exploiting the liminal zones of the modern city. On slow days we spend a lot of time waiting around, dead time whiled away on park benches, street corners or the steps in front of buildings. Many couriers exist off the grid – living as squatters in abandoned buildings, carrying all their possessions in their enormous messenger bags, foraging for discarded food in the bins outside supermarkets. And so as a courier I became good at discovering those places where the city offers amenity. Stand-by spots, those places where we sit and wait for work, grow up around architectural quirks that create a sympathetic environment in the midst of concrete, glass and steel: a street corner close to some public
toilets, a wall under the ducts that spew out warm, recycled air from the bowels of buildings.

While I sat with other riders waiting for work we would complain about our aching knees and tired, worn-out legs. We’d discuss the state of trade, speculating about how much money everyone else was earning. We compared notes on bad controlling. We recalled injustices: being stopped by the police for running red lights at particular junctions; being sent by controllers on great schleps across the city with only one job in the bag. Most of all we would discuss the weather, predicting rain with the gloomy earnestness of farmers or fishermen, dreading the dry heat that wore us out during the summer.

During quiet periods we would memorialise the city too, discussing our favourite streets and the perfect runs we’d made along them, hymning serendipitous formations of tarmac, those sweet-spots of camber and incline we had discovered hidden in the grid. We would go misty-eyed over postcodes that had some special significance for us. We compared notes on our bicycles, discussing the merits of different frame materials and gear ratios. We listed road names and their postcodes, describing our journeys in shorthand, proudly displaying our knowledge of the city to each other.

Frank, my controller at Fleetway, was an Ahab-like savant who ran the circuit as a benign dictatorship. We let him because he was a good controller, able to keep track of things better than any of his riders, remembering
where you were and how many jobs you had on board with an uncanny precision, better than you did yourself. Frank was an ex-cabbie, and the Knowledge swamped his brain. He had been expelled from school at fourteen for stealing mopeds, he once told me, and spent his teenage years as a scholar of the city: joyriding cars and motorbikes down its alleyways and culs-de-sac, learning every back road and aerial walkway, every park and passage and byway and rat-run. He used this mental armoury first to evade the police and later, more legitimately, as a taxi driver. But after a few years on the road he realised that he preferred his mental map of the city to the real thing, and so he retreated to the office to live in it at one remove, traversing London vicariously in his imagination.