CYCLO PEDIA

CYCLO PEDIA

CYCLO PEDIA

T

he particular joy of cycling

seemingly boundless history.
Get on a bike and you can
go anywhere, literally and
metaphorically. Unlike a
football or a tennis racket, a
bike has multiple uses. It is
simultaneously a piece of hightech
sports gear, a means of
transportation
to work or the
store,
a way of discovering the
world,
an escape to solitude and
nature,
a social network that
beats
any of the virtual variety,
and
a means of discovering your
personal
limits, whether by
crawling
up an Alpine pass or
shredding
your nerves downhill
on
a mountain bike. Over the
last
150 years cycling has
helped to change the world and
it may yet help to save it from
environmental catastrophe.
Bikes have carried politicians,
soldiers, explorers, suffragettes,
socialists, artists, and artisans.
Yet as cyclists we tend to exist
in our own bubbles. We race,
we ride to work, we may fret
over whether to buy carbon


For whatever reason we ride
our bikes, and whatever the
depth of our personal passion,
there will be sides of cycling, its
history, its culture, that we don’t
even know exist. There isn’t
time to go everywhere and the
signposts are not always there

William Fotheringham