Bicycle chic

An old butcher-boy delivery bicycle is a standard cliche for a certain type of healthy food shop, parked outside perhaps to suggest old-fashioned values: proper groceries wrapped in brown paper and delivered to your door, which is of course far removed from the self-service, over-wrapped reality. Recently bicycles are being put into shop displays of all kinds, tapping in to the current wave of cycling chic. There was a paisley-covered bicycle in Libertys - ridden by the Liberty's skeleton (but that's another story). Hanging in the window of a fashion shop in Oxford Street is a red-and-white retro cruiser bike with rotating wheels. Specsavers in Tottenham Court Road has a wrought-iron bicycle shaped display stand, not a real bicycle, but then that's an odd shop selling all sorts of stuff apart from specs. There are plenty of others, as becomes apparent once you start to notice the trend. Bike shops don't count of course. This one adorns a smart but otherwise anonymous cafe in Tottenham Court Road.