Why bikes and social justice often run into each other

Summer – as well as other seasons, but most joyfully summer – is the time of the bike. Thirty-three years ago I was working on the launch of the Big Issue and the bike was essential as I travelled about London to meet people, always bringing my pump into meetings with me. Having been a bike thief in my youth, and a purloiner of other people’s bike pumps, I locked the bike carefully and carried the pump assiduously.  

Prior to being – with the help of many – the creator of the Big Issue, I was a printer. My most prestigious job was a magazine for the Tate gallery, then a mere single apple tree and not the orchard it has blossomed into. With my pump I would attend meetings of the great and the good as we discussed a new magazine and I was referred to as ‘the man with the pump’, the great and the good being Oxbridge-matured and not happy with being reminded of the class struggle that bubbled on below and beyond them.  

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So for me in 1991, bikes and social justice ran into each other. I have no idea what bike I had then but I know it served me well until it was stolen by a more astute bike thief than ever I was; for I never carried industrial wire cutters with me to make mincemeat of a bike owner’s security.  

I’m now 78 and still cycling – that’s 68 years since I first successfully stayed on a bike for longer than a few minutes before a knee- and elbow-cutting fall. Bikes were what I coveted. I befriended my first serious girlfriend when I was 10 (and she was 11) because she allowed me many a spin around our local Fulham park. Geraldine Osbourne – no relation I hope to the ruinous chancellor of the Exchequer who got the poor to pay for the bankers’ crisis – cast a spell over me with her gleaming, black-lacquered Raleigh bike. It was love at first ride.  

I use my bike to get to the station to get to London and then walk as much as I can when I arrive. Or I use the time-honoured Circle Line, which remains for me the most exciting bit of the underground network for its clever linkage to parts of Central London. 

The fact it does not entirely encircle now is because Transport for London (TfL) stops it at Edgware Road so then you have to get another train.  

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One of those many curious innovations since the golden days of the launch of the Big Issue in September 1991 was the creation of this transport authority. One of the most ruinous things TfL has done is remove from buses the many destinations they pass through, meaning you are left with the number and the final stop. What a load of ballox that seems to me. And the other is taking a perfectly ordinary bus number like the 91 that used to run west to London Airport – now called Heathrow – and replant it in North London to run from Crouch End to Trafalgar Square.  

Excuse me: I am just remembering many of the calumnies that seem to have befallen us since the days of the Big Issue’s creation. Of course there are many. Possibly one of the most worrying and challenging innovations is the encouraging of cities to become canyons of glass-box offices. Modern architecture that decimates the human scale and pushes up the costs of living for those not on the top dollar and not ‘riding high on the hog’.  

The bike remains the simple friend of us all if we use it to exercise and travel, for it seems that since the creation of the Big Issue we have become more sedentary.   

The change has been enormous but not necessarily for the best. Our children are now phone addicts. Governments have been devalued because they never seem to deliver more than a flowerpot when they promise a forest. One could list the many woes since the summer of 1991 when my colleagues and I first crafted the thing that you hold in your hand.  

But lamentations are not worth the candle. What we need to know is what we can now do to spirit us into a new and better place. A new administration promises us that forest again, and we should be careful to avoid accepting the flowerpot as all that is possible.   

Getting involved in the community we live in. Getting involved in local politics. Getting involved in protecting our own health and that of our families; getting on our bike as oft as we can. Getting time to walk and indulge ourselves in nature.  

But also questioning power on what is being done to end the tyranny of poverty. What is being done to end the ugliness of those that are left out of the social equation, in the shadowlands of our democracy.  

Bikes and the Big Issue that summer. Don’t ask me what songs were being played, or what balls were being kicked into what nets by whom. 

All I know is that the Big Issue remains a great provider of meaning in a dislocated, class-separated and divided world.

John Bird is the founder and editor-in-chief of The Big Issue. Read more of his words here.

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