Re:Cyclists

Description

Somewhere in a German forest 200 years ago, during the darkest, wettest summer for centuries, the story of cycling began. The calls to ban it were more or less instant.Re:cyclists is the tale of what happened next, of how we have spent two centuries wheeling our way about town and country on bikes – or on two-wheeled things that vaguely resembled what we now call bikes. Michael Hutchinson picks his way through those 200 years, discovering how cycling became a kinky vaudeville act for Parisians, how it became an American business empire, and how it went on to find a unique home in the British Isles. He considers the penny-farthing riders exploring the abandoned and lonely coaching roads during the railway era, and the Victorian high-society cyclists of the 1890s bicycle craze – a time when no aristocratic house party was without bicycles and when the Prince of Wales used to give himself an illicit thrill on a weekday afternoon by watching the women's...