The Critical Mass Tour

Always on the lookout for new tour experiences, I got on my bike and joined the Critical Mass Tour yesterday. It is easy to know when and where to find it: 7PM on the last Friday of the Month from under Waterloo Bridge. It has been like that for as long as I have known and I was on a Critical Mass ride quite some years ago, maybe as far back as 10 years ago. It was therefore an overdue and exciting proposition, as it offered a wildly different sort of tour to those so far covered on the blog.

I made my way to Waterloo Bridge and found quite a crowd already assembled. Many hundred cyclists gathered on all sorts of bikes, including quite a number on the so-called 'Boris Bikes': the rental bikes named after the populist conservative Mayor of London, administered by the city and sponsored by a bank that does not need promoting. It was surprising to see so many as I thought Critical Mass was for hardened cyclists only. Also, since this ride was of an indefinite duration, I thought it would be unattractive to those renting bikes by the hour. Happily, I was wrong. The protocol is you arrive anytime after 6PM to be ready to start cycling at 7PM. While cyclists gathered there was a lot of chat and some, mostly, restrained drinking: I saw a guy next to me swigging from a bottle of Captain Morgan but most contented themselves with a single beer.  

At 7PM there was a swelling of noise: horns, bells, cries and inarticulate bloke-ish guttural sounds. It was the sign; we were off! We slowly emptied the Southbank and cycled past The National Theatre on our way up to the main road. This site is for me a curious one that I can't help but read more into than was probably intended. Maybe that's simply because I was previously much more involved in these spaces through the arts than I was through tours and so I come to them with an eye that still sees them as stages. I did in fact make a short POPLAR TV video outside the National Theatre last year: National Theatre To Screen Sport.

We set off and headed North over Waterloo Bridge. This is Somerset House on the right. It was not so easy to take pictures and ride at the same time but I tried my best to juggle the two. Crossing the bridge took us into the heart of London and I had to ask myself if this  happens every Critical Mass time or whether the group sometimes heads off on a very different tact. 

We descended into a road tunnel that is usually reserved for motor vehicles. There was much excited yelling as the bikes accelerated down into the tunnel, deep into the car zone. The relationship with motor vehicles is particularly bad at the moment owing to a spate of fatal accidents in the last month. Earlier in the day there had been a mass "die in" outside Transport for London's offices in protest at their transport policy and inertia at implementing agreed to improvements to the cycling infrastructure. All of this was still very much in the air as we made our way through the city.

Once we got going and settled into a rhythm I started looking a bit more at how the ride functioned. One quality that makes it deliciously slippery is the fact that there is no designated leader or organiser. There is a webpage, which is no longer updated, and this, I can imagine, might be so that nobody may be held responsible for the Critical Mass. That said, I did notice that there were people at the front of the group who did have opinions and were were not afraid to express them. For example, we were at this point approaching Oxford Street and I heard three cyclists say between them that we should avoid that road as it would mean battling buses. They then disappeared at speed towards the front to try and have their sway and lo and behold we avoided Oxford Street. Another quality is that some people dressed up. This man is wearing an animal costume. The tricky thing with it must be the tail, I hope he managed to avoid getting his tail caught up in the spokes of his back wheel. 

Predictably enough the people who hate Critical Mass the most are the taxi drivers. This chap in particular was a nasty piece of work who drove into a stationary cyclist who was standing in front of him in order to try and clear her from the road. No excuse. Lizard brain.

This then sparked off a heated exchange with a passerby who seemed to have a lot of opinions and thought of himself as a peacemaker. To be honest I thought of him as a twit in a shiny grey suit who was covering the driver. Instinct was to take my lock and smash the drivers windscreen so he could have a taste of his own medicine but of course I was far too polite and just took pictures.

Not everyone was in such bad humour however. There was actually quite a varied response to the ride from the people in cars and those standing by the sides of the street. Some smiled and waved, others stared disapprovingly but everyone noticed: you could hardly not see 700 bikes stream past. The cyclist standing here is blocking the car from going into the mass of bikes and this was a common activity. At junctions bikes block the way so cars can't force their way into the pack and it was this job of enforcing the blockade which was the one that the more experienced 'Massers' took on more readily and which also put them potentially into conflict situations like that with the white taxi.

I saw a few people drinking beer as they cycled but most kept their hands on the handlebars or reaching to their phones to take pictures. There was however a bit of a Friday night atmosphere about the ride all the same and quite a number thought things through enough to take a supply with them. This was not just a demonstration or a ride, it was also a party.

That was underscored by the music. This bike was trailing a sound system and it was just one of 4 or 5 that were playing different sorts of music, everything from dance music to opera. The opera in particular was unexpected and not the typical soundtrack for a demonstration.

We headed West along Piccadilly and then down into another road tunnel. There was a bit of a thing with the tunnels, enjoying the forbidden fruit. 

And then after passing near Victoria we came to Buckingham Palace and the bikes gathered around this famous monument whose name I have never bothered to learn. Many of the riders sat back and opened up those cans of beer they'd been saving, others made circles around it, this man with two skateboarders in tow. There were quite a number of young skateboarders who mostly raced around the front of the pack. I remember last time I went on a Critical Mass it also stopped at this same spot and this gets me asking, what is the geographic palette it works with? I can't imagine a mass of bikes making its way to Crystal Palace in South London, that would be too far to get home for anyone living in the North and so my guess is there must be some unwritten rules. I did in fact cycle at the front to find out how the direction was chosen and I heard people shouting "LEFT!" from time to time so I guess it is mostly self-regulating. 

I left them to it as it looked to me as if the evening was settling into a bit of a party in front of the palace.  I was wrong on that front, that's for sure. The video below was posted on youtube which more or less shows what happened after I left: the night had quite a bit more cycling still to go.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7skLQ4QyXaA

My current Tour of All Tours research is centred on Shoreditch and today's tour did not go there, the nearest it got was Tower Bridge, which you can see in the video. Critical Mass could visit Shoreditch however so there is no reason why I cannot mention it as a tour that sometimes passes that way, even if it is an infrequent and irregular occurrence. It will be back East I go tomorrow however as there are still quite a number of tours still to cover in the area.

The Bridges of London Tour

This was a boat tour, a first for this blog but hopefully far from the last, and it was led by broadcaster and architectural historian Dan Cruickshank. Upon embarking at the Tower of London pier I was offered a glass a wine and then made my way to the top of the boat where a growing crowd of us waited for the boat to depart and our tour to begin.

I was not aware of Dan Cruickshank's programmes but quickly guessed he must be something of a celebrity as, during the pre-tour wait, a number of people introduced themselves to him and asked to have their pictures taken beside him. Obligingly and with good humour he did so. Looking now at the substantial list of programmes he has researched and presented for the BBC I see the 2012 broadcast that was the template for this evening's tour: The Bridges That Built London 

Dan Cruickshank explores the mysteries and secrets of the bridges that have made London what it is. He uncovers stories of bronze-age relics emerging from the Vauxhall shore, of why London Bridge was falling down, of midnight corpses splashing beneath Waterloo Bridge, and above all, of the sublime ambition of London's bridge builders themselves.

This was basically our tour too, except we were not watching it on the box but were taking it in a boat in the company of the presenter himself and could enjoy a glass of wine along the way. This was, in effect, a television made real tour.

It just remained for the captain to make some brief health and safety announcements, a somewhat familiar protocol (e.g. Victoria Park Memoryscape Tour), and we set off into the dusk.

That's when the light food was offered. It made a welcome return later in the cruise too and this made me wonder if this was in some way a 'bribe' to endear us to the event. Upon reflection however, that is the thinking of someone who has taken a few too many walking tours and was unaccustomed to river cruises. This most certainly was part of the package and it is wrong to try and separate it from the rest of the tour, just as it is a mistake to not include the pub at the end of the walking tour that often plays its role in the event. That said, we were in effect taking our tour on a floating bar with the staff bringing a steady flow of wine and tea up to us. This gave the whole affair a much more relaxed atmosphere than a walking tour where you have to make continuous effort. 

The commentary began with Tower Bridge and we were told about its construction: dates, architect, technology, rationale, style, cost, reception and consequences. This included a nice story about Queen Victoria being secretly opposed to it as she thought it might jeopardise the security of the Tower of London, still considered in the late 19th Century a refuge of last resort in the case of a republican uprising. We headed upstream and heard a similar type of description at each bridge and in the stretches between them also heard more general observations on things that could be seen from the boat such as how The Embankment narrowed the river and changed its character.  

Some of the bridges were architecturally interesting and we heard a good deal about the evolution of materials and methods used to construct them. The new London Bridge however is no charmer, as the forced labourers used as guards for last year's Jubilee Pageant would probably agree.

By the time we reached Blackfriars Railway Bridge dusk had truly given way to night and as there were no lights above deck Mr Cruickshank had to use a pocket lamp to read his notes. I have the impression he is somebody who communicates a lot with his hands and this created a choreography of light, a pool of illumination skipping between the bridges, his notes, circling in the air when he was thinking and stopping upon me, it seemed, when he was making a full stop in his sentences. The woman in the foreground acted as his assistant holding the pages when the wind whipped them up or fixing his lamp when it switched to red for no good reason. Mr Cruickshank, to his credit, took these things in his stride, acknowledging any mishaps, making light of them and moving on.

The night only got blacker still and finally there was not so much to see except the lights from buildings on the riverbank and bridges caught in moments of flash photography. Here is Westminster Bridge looming out of the night. This left me feeling that the tour would have worked far better if it were arranged as a weekend afternoon cruise when we could have clearly seen all the things that were being talked about. What's more, the boat's progress along the river and the spoken descriptions could have been better coordinated. The text that acted as his source material had been been written to be narrated for a documentary and not developed as a river tour. This meant that there was sometimes too much to say in some sections which were interrupted by the next bridge while in the fallow zone after Westminster Bridge there was not so much to say. A tour that is developed for a specific route and honed over time has the opportunity to deepen its relationship to the route, for the guide's timing to become precise and detailed observations particular to the route to be made. This cruise was however a one-off event and as such was more freewheeling and, it must be said, was largely taken in that spirit.  

After passing Vauxhall Bridge the boat turned around and made its way downstream back towards The Tower. We descended below to the warmth and light and Dan Cruickshank interspersed the homeward journey with some short literary readings such as Wordsworth's Upon Westminster Bridge. The final impression of the tour was rather mixed for me as it was on the one hand rough in its surface and on the other I was aware that this was an influential version of the capital's history that I was listening to being given live. This mismatch between the simplicity of the event with all its attendant niggles and the impact of the tour, a TV tour made real, was curious to observe and I wondered whether people were watching the actual event of whether they were using it as a springboard for a televisual imagination. This is a way to say I wonder if the same tour was given by someone the public knew nothing of whether they would perceive it in a similar way or not. I suspect that they would view it quite differently but then again, if it were given by someone unknown it would be a very different sort of event as the expectations would not be the same. In any case, Dan Cruickshank held together both the real and the TV tour, with charm and a depth of knowledge so I can see how this makes him most suitable for broadcasting.

Thames Festival who presented this cruise have a number of other tours and art events coming up this week and next including a series of walks along London's lost rivers by Tom Bolten who is interviewed about these on Talking Walking and several other tours around and about the river and indeed some walks along the river bank itself. It looks like a good program.