There was a moment during last month’s Ride London cycle race that will stay with me more than any other. It wasn’t the sight of that finish line on Tower Bridge, glorious as it was after 100 miles; nor was it the first sip of that post-finish pint, much as I’d been dreaming of it all the way round. It was a moment about 50 miles in, lying on the grass somewhere in the Essex countryside, when I took in the sight of ordinary people, men and women, old and young, black and white; hundreds if not thousands of them, all dressed in helmets and Lycra and popping electrolytes as far as the eye could see.
The reason this merry scene stopped me in my tracks isn’t that I have a thing for tight sports clothing or helmet hair. It was that it felt like a flicker of what cycling in London could look like, in some parallel universe, if cars didn’t exist and those on two wheels actually looked like a cross-section of the city.
