I Love Riding in the City

NAME: Chipps Chippendale
LOCATION: Currently in Yorkshire, UK
OCCUPATION: Bike Journo

What’s your favorite (or the most exotic) city you’ve ridden in, and what was special or memorable?
I was a bike messenger in London, wow, 15 years ago now, but I still look back on it with great fondness. It was a time when I got to ride my bike every day through the streets of London. One of the best places to thread a bicycle through traffic chaos. As Travis Culley said in ‘The Immortal Class’ - there comes a time when you can see into the future. You can see where all the traffic you are riding through will be in five seconds’ time and you plan your route through it. Traffic in London moves at an average of 12mph - slower than a fit cyclist can sustain for hours. This lets you pick your place between the cars and red London buses, choosing when to make your attack. London’s pretty flat, so you can just hoon along all day.
The streets of London have evolved over a couple of thousand years, certainly not with cars in mind. The labyrinthine streetmap is compounded by one-way streets, dead ends and bus lanes. But after a few months of riding, everything starts coming together. Just as a good typist can’t always tell you where the ‘k’ key is on a keyboard, but can write ‘keyboard’ without thinking, so my routes across town became embedded into my mind, with streetnames replaced by landmarks like ad agencies, photo studios and coffee shops... Happy days.

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