Cycling was born in Brum

Before Birmingham was the nation’s ‘motor city’ it was a ‘cycling city’. The design of the modern bicycle—diamond frame, wheels of equal size—emerged in Coventry in the 1880s and quickly replaced the ‘high-wheeler’ or ‘penny-farthing’. By the 1890s, the Birmingham-Coventry axis was the beating heart of the first global bicycle age. As ‘Bike Week’ turns 100, now is a good time to reassess cycling’s past and future in Birmingham and beyond.

John Kemp Starley’s 1885 Rover Safety Bicycle is widely considered to be the first successful modern bicycle. When the Irish veterinarian John Dunlop rediscovered the pneumatic tyre in 1888, the safety bicycle became accessible to almost everyone. By 1894, Dunlop had moved his operation to Birmingham to be closer to the bicycle industry. The subsequent bicycle boom introduced a revolution in personal mobility.

The West Midlands was at the centre of this transformation. Throughout the 1890s and into the first half of the 20^th century, Rover, and Triumph in Coventry and B.S.A. and Hercules in Birmingham expanded rapidly becoming major players in the global market. As late as 1927, the region remained the centre of the industry with Birmingham-based Hercules Cycles employing directly or indirectly 25,000 people and producing 30,000 bicycles a week in its 11-acre factory in Aston.

The social changes ushered in by the safety bicycle were dramatic and swift. Initially taken up by the upper classes, by the mid-1890s the middle and working class were saving every penny to purchase a bicycle. Bicycles quickly became a part of the fabric of urban life with hundreds of thousands sold each year. By 1898, even the Methodist Bishop of Coventry could be found cycling around his parish.

The ‘poor man’s horse’ liberated the working class and clubs quickly formed to travel out of the industrial city to the fresh air of the countryside. In Birmingham, a socialist organization established its own bicycle club, the National Clarion Cycling Club, which is still active today. Beyond the dictates of revolution, less radically inclined cyclists could be found in the thousands. In 1895 in Tamworth, 4,255 cyclists passed through the city on the August Bank Holiday.

The bicycle transformed the everyday lives of women. Many women in Britain would have agreed with the Minneapolis Tribune when it noted: ‘A woman awheel is an independent creature, free to go whither she will. This, before the advent of the bicycle, was denied her’. The mass popularity of the bicycle is also credited with ‘rationalizing’ women’s clothing, as women abandoned their skirts, corsets, and dresses in favour of bloomers to pedal in.

The bicycle, then, was viewed and celebrated as a radical technology that undermined Victorian class and gendered order. Given this revolutionary potential, those in power often attempted to stop people riding bicycles. My research and others’ have shown that at each step of its popularity various authorities have worked to corral and stop certain cyclists.

In the 1890s, women cyclists were frequently sexually objectified and monitored, while Black American cyclists were often the first to be arrested for breaking new cycling laws. In the 1970s, the policing of Black cyclists in Washington, DC formed the basis of ‘stop and search’ legislation that has had a disproportionately negative impact on Black and Hispanic Americans. To this day, cycling as a sport and as a way to get around remains stubbornly white and male with many groups on both sides of the Atlantic working actively to diversify it. Meanwhile, something as innocuous as a bicycle lane or Low Traffic Neighbourhood has recently met with violent resistance and conspiracy theories.

The bicycle never went away. As late as 1972, less than half of Birmingham households owned a car. The climate crisis requires us to immediately reorient our cities back to active transportation (walking and cycling). Some cities, like Paris, have started this radical transformation. Universities and other cultural institutions must also take a leadership role in this change.

At the same time, we must recognize that the culture of cycling—and the state’s response to it—has a long history of exclusionary practices in which able-bodied white men are understood as the ‘typical’ cyclist at the expense of all others. Recognizing and addressing this history will create a more equitable transportation future that can better speak to both the climate crisis and the intersecting legacy of systemic injustice.