Headcam crazy

What's this craze for headcams all about?

Filming yourself riding a bike might once have seemed absurdly pretentious, something only an avant garde artist would do, but nowadays the cycle magazines advertise helmet mounted cameras and it's no surprise to discover that people buy them. They even wear them in the street: this guy is at the London Cycling Campaign's Big Ride earlier this year. But while riding a bike is invigorating, frees your thoughts from everyday worries and only gets slightly boring if you do the same route every day, watching a video of someone's bicycle commuting route is of course like watching paint dry. Not exactly riveting.

The original purpose of the headcam was to capture exciting off road action on mountain bikes, so you could re-live the moment and perhaps work out why you crashed. There's a definite trend though, for urban cyclists to wear one on the way to work as a matter of course. I even know someone who does just that.

I suppose there can be exciting moments. Once I cycled the length of Tottenham Court Road holding a digital camera in one hand and steering with the other hand. 'Where's the drama?' my other half sneered, until it came to squeezing through the narrow gap between a bus and a lorry*, dodging pedestrians at the red lights and all that - it looks a lot more dangerous on camera than it really is. Not worth uploading to YouTube though, and soon deleted to free up hard disc space. Back in 2004 someone made a six-minute video of a messenger bike race in New York city that actually did bear watching, but only because it featured a group of riders being outrageously illegal, stopping cars and pedestrians in their tracks.

So do the modern headcammers want to capture bits of everyday excitement? No, apparently it's a form of insurance, a way to record bad driving and aggressive drivers, just in case. There are endless clips posted online featuring petty disagreements between cyclists and drivers. Some not so petty you might think, since they involve death threats, but of course that's all talk except in very rare cases. The trouble with this approach is that it encourages a combative attitude, which weight for weight doesn't look like such a good idea - an average bike weighs around 15kg, maybe 10kg if it's an expensive racing bike, while a typical car weighs 1200kg. It might be a good idea to think twice before you go banging on car windows, shouting at drivers at the next lights - and then threatening them that it's all on video. Getting people angry is not going to make the roads any safer.

*Note: that was a stationary bus and a stationary lorry. You should never ever do that if the vehicles are moving or even have time to move before you get to the next traffic lights.

Olympic madness: Dutch bikes take over East London

These are just a few of the Dutch rental bikes that appeared outside Blackhorse Road tube in East London shortly before the Olympics started, greatly outnumbering the commuter bikes locked up outside the station. Often there are a hundred or more identical blue and yellow bicycles, neatly stacked close together.

Why? The Olympic campground is a bit more than a mile down the road, occupying playing fields on Walthamstow Marshes for the duration. Seen from the air, a high proportion of the tents are orange, which can mean only one thing: the Dutch contingent is camping there en masse. The bikes belong to OV-fiets, the rental company who have bases at most railway stations in the Netherlands. Unlike our own Boris bikes, you need membership to rent these, so they are only really available to nationals. Most of the bikes are identical but I saw a few decorated with flowers. Marigolds, naturally. You can even see passengers riding sidesaddle on the luggage rack - common in Amsterdam, but perhaps not so sensible in London.

The Borough of Waltham Forest has risen admirably to the occasion by posting signs all round the junction, introducing a new rule for the occasion: DO NOT CHAIN BICYCLES TO THE RAILINGS.

Flying the flag

What with the Jubilee and now the Olympics, recently you can't go anywhere without seeing the Union Jack, not just a printed logo but actual flags, flying singly or in strings. There's the traditional version, printed in primary colours on fabric, and similar plastic varieties. Then there's the Olympic version in pink and turquoise, a neat subversion of the nationalistic image. Rows of large Union Jacks are strung across Oxford Street (Regent Street features an international selection). Pubs are festooned with bunting, strings of flags hang all the way round Fitzroy Square, people even carry flags to wave. All interestingly reminiscent of the United States around the 4th of July, Independence Day, when the stars and stripes is on display in every public place, strung across streets and on house fronts, decorating pickup trucks and shop window displays. For now the right-wing xenophobic connotations are completely lost in the sheer enthusiasm for decoration, and maybe it will stay that way, but more likely everything will go back to normal around Christmas, and the NF will get their emblem back. But then again, maybe not.

Get your bike fixed?

The other day I visited my favourite bike shop, Bikefix in Lambs Conduit Street. The owner mentioned that they get some bad reviews online, so I checked it out next time I got to a free wifi cafe. What a lot of negative comments! Of course all bike shops get that sort of review, it's not that Bikefix has a monopoly on negativity, but it does seem a bit above average. Actually it's quite a special place, full of odd bikes and nice accessories that you would never see anywhere else, and a complete antidote to the On Your Bike type of bicycle supermarket. You might even meet some interesting people there, especially if talking bikes is your sort to thing.

So why the comments? The issue here seems to be a huge comprehension gap. It's a bit like when I try to explain to my wife what's going wrong with our loft conversion: I'm an architect but she knows absolutely nothing about the practicalities of building, so I end up sounding like a condescending arsehole (so I'm told). We just don't speak the same language, although being an architect I can at least draw pictures to make things clearer, but it's also a matter of different priorities, different values. Bike shops are like that. You come in with your typical ordinary bike and you know there is something wrong with it. Maybe the chain keeps coming off, or it won't change gears any more. Probably you've already decided how much it's worth to get it fixed and you hope to get it back in time to ride home that evening, if not within the next fifteen minutes. Now, the staff at Bikefix are without exception bike nuts, like most proper bike shop staff. They know about every kind of bike there is and probably have some heavily customised machine of their own that they change around every week to make it cooler, or faster, or just plain different. What are they going to think of your ordinary bike? Well, to keep it short, they are going to see more wrong with it than you do. They know what they would do if it was their bike (strip it right down and replace most of the parts, throw out those luggage racks and all those unnecessary bolted-on bits, maybe even a quick spraycan job to brighten up that dismal dull silver-grey finish). What can they do about your problem? They know exactly what will happen if they just replace the bit you think needs replacing: the chain will still come off, or the gears will be ok for a week and then start to seize up again. So they explain what they see as the way to sort it out permanently, and of course it's five times the figure you had in mind, maybe more than you paid for the bike in the first place. And it will be ready on Thursday, not today. After all, it takes time as well as parts, and shops only exist to make a living wage. Of course that's not what inevitably happens - most repair jobs are actually quite straightforward - but you can see the scope for frustration. That's one route to disillusionment, but maybe also inspiration to put your money in the right place and invest in a decent bike, whether by ditching your old piece of crap or by getting it to work nicely.

At the other end of the scale, some of the gadget freaks who like expensive bikes are among the most persnickety people in the world. Is that a proper English word? It certainly feels like the right word to describe that particular combination of uncertainty and obsessive attention to detail. Take a look at a specialised bicycle forum if you don't believe me, or have a laugh at the one review of Bikefix on Time Out. These people know enough to know what they don't like but not enough to know how to achieve what they do want. A no-win situation for everyone involved, potentially.

Do satisfied customers wrote reviews? I once bought a lemon-yellow Brompton there. They have an excellent online system for choosing all the different options for colours, gears, type of handlebar etc. but after I did that I went in to finalise the order. They didn't like the colour but they didn't try to change my mind, and warned me accurately about what was then a long order time. It certainly didn't occur to me to find an online review site and say how the yellow was exactly as lemony as I hoped and the bike had absolutely nothing wrong with it. Between the two extremes, Bikefix is a pleasure to visit and they can usually do or get whatever it is that you want. Within reason.

Post industrial landscape in East London 3/3

We rejoin the Greenway where it crosses the A12. There is now a brand-new bridge (not yet open) and a pedestrian crossing in case you don't care to climb all those steps. Like the way the Greenway itself has been improved for the Olympics, it's stylish and imaginative. It's interesting to see the way the Olympic landscaping incorporates bits of old concrete and metal, unusual seats designed by students and bits of arty sculpture to make something interesting out of what was really a bit grim. There are security guards here too, but only patrolling the perimeter of the Olympics site and presumably only for the duration of the event.

We stop to admire the ornate Victorian buildings at Abbey Mills pumping station. After that the improvements fizzle out and the route is somewhat older, cracked tarmac and concrete, endless terraced houses both sides, and little roads that cross over the Greenway at intervals. These junctions all have metal gates, randomly wide open or locked shut, and those annoying bicycle barriers where you have to get off and push your bike underneath the bar. You can just about straddle the crossbar to squeeze under without dismounting. Seeing my strained expression a passer-by advises me to "watch yer head". It's not my head I'm worried about though. "Oh yeah, see where you're coming from there mate" he sniggers. Time to move on.

We ride the remaining four miles to Beckton uneventfully. Completely losing the route at the A13, we climb the giant spoil heap known as Beckton Alps to see where we are. The bottom of the 'Alps' is a nice winding path through the trees, but higher up, inexplicably, we find the top, the open bit with the view, is completely surrounded by a high metal security fence. Fortunately some public-spirited person has removed a few railings so we can squeeze through, minus bikes, and climb to the top. What a view! This must be the only place where you can see the whole of the city spread out before you: Greenwich, Canary Wharf, the Gherkin and the Shard, Stratford and the Orbit tower at the Olympic site, all spread out in one amazing vista. It's the one photograph I take all day, knowing a photo can't hope to convey the scale of all this.

Post-industrial landscape in East London 2/3

Not so long ago the marshes were a wasteland, more or less unregulated, with burnt-out cars and occasionally kids riding motorcycles, but also a true sense of wild untended nature. You could walk or ride a bike where you wanted, climb trees and bring a rope to make a swing, very like the wastelands I loved when I was a boy. The role of the LVA is to turn that into a properly regulated nature park, because for various reasons wasteland is no longer acceptable, especially perhaps because a wasteland could be taken over for development while a park cannot. Whatever the reasons, the Lea Valley is of course a huge asset to the area, but with regulation and management come corresponding opportunities for people using the place to be fenced off, confronted with prohibition notices, or actually told off in person. At one point the Authority got rid of their park rangers, who were of course educated and polite people who walked around the nature reserves, and replaced them with private security patrols who dressed in black, drove unmarked white vans, and of course knew nothing whatsoever about wildlife or walking routes. These characters made a point of interfering with families eating picnics and children climbing trees, let alone youths with a ghetto blaster and cans of beer, on the basis that they're keeping the place safe, but missing the point that perhaps the level of contact with the public might be a little excessive, and their image more threatening than reassuring. Perhaps people more vocal than myself have persuaded the Authority to tread more lightly, because I haven't seen them lately.

That was the LVA's worst excess, putting into perspective minor annoyances like unnecessary gates and barriers (supposedly only temporary), and their failure to get rid of the rubbish or to make decent paths. The chain of reservoirs nearby looks like going the same way. Currently they are operated by Thames Water, who maintain the place efficiently but leave the margins entirely wild, a true nature reserve in the sense that wildlife coexists naturally with the function of the place. Only fishermen go there, putting a pound in an envelope and dropping it into the honesty box. Now Waltham Forest have won lottery money to turn the place into another nature park. Catch it while you still can and see the difference for yourself.

Across Hackney Marsh football fields, a vast expanse of grass that's escaped the grasp of the Olympics, we get on to the canal towpath. The towpath recently got the Olympic upgrade treatment, properly laid paths that are maybe less fun than awful muddy ruts but actually quite nice for cycling, now the loose gravel is starting to bed down to a less slippery surface. Alongside the Olympic site the graffiti-covered warehouses and artists studios are still there, surprisingly not wiped out by new developments, although you can see the signs of change everywhere. One old warehouse has huge new windows cut through the graffiti-covered brickwork, and a concrete-framed building next to the lock suddenly has new glass walls, with the steel skeleton of the old loading bay still suspended over the canal.