About me
My name is Dave Horton. I live in Lancaster, in the north-west of England, with my partner, Sue, and two children, Bobby (who’s 8) and Flo (6). I’m 42 years old.
I’m a sociologist by training, and currently work at Lancaster Environment Centre, Lancaster University, on a project to do with walking and cycling, and the capacity of these most sustainable modes of mobility to re-make cities and towns fit for the twenty-first century.
Somehow or other, in the strange and not entirely comprehensible way such things tend to happen, cycling has steadily come to be a very significant feature in my life. I have always cycled, for many different reasons: to escape (the city, domestic strife, my own self); to move around (for shopping, work); to earn a living (once as a paper-boy, now as someone who thinks about cycling, and cycles in order to think about cycling); to explore the world (whether through cycle-touring in distant lands or pedalling gently down the cycle track along the river Lune on a Sunday morning with my kids); to challenge myself (exploring the world, racing, finding hard and hilly routes, or just trying something new).
I’ve started this blog because I love thinking, I love cycling and I love writing.
I am passionate about cycling, and I hope I’ll succeed in communicating some of that passion here. But I also believe we need to think about cycling in new ways. One of my goals is to contribute to new ways of thinking about cycling, and thereby help to ensure cycling becomes a major means of mobility into an alternative, enlightened green future.
On this blog, you won’t find much technical detail about current cycling policy. There already exist many good websites outlining the various different ways in which different people, organisations, governments and societies are attempting to get more people on bikes.
You will find occasional critiques of current cycling policy. Why? Certainly not because I’m against cycling promotion; I want to be (and hopefully am) part of the push for cycling. No, I’m sometimes critical because one of my aims with this blog is to create a kind of intellectual space for fresh thinking about cycling. If we want cycling to be different into the future, a first step is to start thinking differently about cycling, opening up new potentials for this means of moving around. And that means sometimes thinking critically, finding the world-as-it-is to be wanting, and striving to build the world-as-it-can-be.
Cycling can be much more than it currently is, but we must work to make it so, and an important part of that work has to be intellectual.
I believe cycling can be the most important and popular means of mobility on our planet, accounting for well over half of all journeys in all societies. But there’s no way current pro-cycling policy is going to get us there. I believe that we need to reshape how we think about cycling, in order to reshape cycling.
That’s part of my project. The other part is to have fun, speculate, ruminate, dream. No doubt we’lll go down many cul-de-sacs, but some of them might have a snicket for cycling at their end …. I hope you’ll stick around, or sometimes come back, to find out more.
September 22, 2009 at 12:04 pm |
Hi Dave
I also am a sociologist, and also one living and working in one of the original Cycling Demonstration Towns, Darlington. I too am interested in the cultural dimensions to cycling. Please have a look at the Beauty and the Bike project, which has recently formed the basis for my work. I guess you might call this action research, though these days I’m more concerned with film production than paper writing as such. I’d be interested to know whether, as a cyclist/sociologist, you have tried to engage with your local authority’s approach to developing cycling. This I have done profoundly in Darlington, helping found a Cycling Campaign, and trying to drag the debate about increasing cycling levels into the 21st century. Some limited successes. But I’d be interested to hear from your own experiences. And whether we should look at linking up at some point.
Best Wishes
Richard Grassick
September 24, 2009 at 5:26 am |
Hi Richard
Absolutely fantastic, both to hear from you and to see what you’re doing in Darlington! Thanks for getting in touch. The Beauty and the Bike project looks like a brilliant intervention, and I really look forward to seeing the documentary.
Obviously, I agree with you – getting young people cycling is key, and in the UK young women are one of the really ‘hard-to-reach’ groups. Sustrans’ Bike It project and Bikeability are doing great work, especially in getting younger children to cycle; but sustaining the obvious enthusiasm for cycling across the transition from primary to secondary school, and then again across the later teenage years when the car starts getting in the way, are key challenges in cycling promotion. I have talked with people at CTC (the UK’s national cyclists’ organisation) about this, and I know that as an organisation it is very interested in how in the UK we effect the cultural move, when it comes to attitudes to and practices of cycling, from seeing bikes as toys (on which to play), to seeing them as tools (with which to stitch the complexities of our everyday lives together). I’d like to do some research into this area myself, at some point. But I love the way your project is working at the intersections of two key issues in cycling promotion – gender and youth.
Yes, I’ve been reasonably involved in Lancaster’s Cycling Demonstration Town (CDT) project. I’m part of Dynamo, Lancaster and District’s Cycle Campaign, and in the early days (back in 2005), we worked very hard in trying to encourage the City Council to adopt a more cultural approach to cycling than it might otherwise have done. As you know, the tendency among many local authorities is to focus on infrastructure, and we wanted to question that.
At the outset, Dynamo organised a big public meeting designed to bring together, and to pool the ideas and energies of, all the various pro-cycling constituencies in the district (bike clubs, bike shops, campaigners, interested councillors and residents). And we drew up a huge list of the many and varied cultural initiatives which might/should be taken to boost cycling over the lifetime of the CDT project.
So I guess there are two aspects to the cultural approach which Dynamo has sought to champion. The first focuses on broadening participation in the CDT project. We did well at this in the beginning, getting everyone together, and trying to ensure that as many people as possible felt they had a stake in the business of local cycling promotion. And some of those constituencies are still involved. But on the whole, my sense is that the City Council has rather failed here; it doesn’t really know how to inspire people’s participation, and tends instead to stifle it. Early in the project, for example, Steering Group meetings were monthly, well advertised and well attended; but now they’re far less frequent and meaningful participation seems almost to be discouraged (I know there’s a potential rationale for manufacturing that decline in participation as a project cycle ‘matures’, but I think it’s a terribly flawed one). Obviously, we could talk about this at length, and maybe we should!
The second aspect of our local ‘cultural turn’ has been a bit more successful. At the first CDT meeting we managed to push the importance of promoting cycling culturally, not just infrastructurally, up the agenda. It wasn’t given as high a priority as it probably should have been, but the fact that cycling is cultural – and needs treating as such – at least got into the collective consciousness of key people involved in the process. And over the last four years, we’ve seen a big improvement in pro-cycling events and initiatives – festivals, organised rides, stalls, cycle training, and a whole range of promotion and communication activities (check out the website, Celebrating Cycling, which I think is really pretty good).
Following the lead of Andy Salkeld at Leicester City Council, I was involved in getting a Bike Film Festival established here, and that’s now become a key feature of the cycling calendar. I’d like to see much more culturally-oriented stuff happening though, including – for example – a big expansion in talks (this year we had Chris Carlsson, who I regard as one of the key cycling intellectuals in the world, talk to a packed house at The Dukes, and in the past round-the-world cycle explorer, writer and general good-egg Alastair Humphreys has done the same. But there’s clearly scope to build on that type of event).
But as you note, there’s so much more that could be being done, not just culturally, but also infrastructurally (we’re still at the stage, here, of congratulating ourselves on relative trifles such as advanced stop lines and contraflow cycling; the more radical stuff – removal of space for cars, complete inversion of the current transport order (so that cycling (and walking) routes take precedence over driving routes), drastic and blanket speed reduction measures – is seen as just too way-out and/or controversial – which could easily be read as a damning indictment of the whole CDT (and Cycling England) project, couldn’t it?).
Please keep in touch, keep up the great work, and all the best
Dave
November 18, 2009 at 6:03 pm |
Dear Dave, we would like to inform you about the premiere of our film “Beauty and the bike” in Darlington Art Centre at the 9th of December 7pm. Starting with an exhibition at 5:30 in our rooms: Darlington Media Group.
Please have a look at our web site
http://www.bikebeauty.org
to learn more about it.
We will also launch a book with the film dealing with British Transport Policy and our girls and young women, who would love to cycle more if the infrastructure was sorted.
Let us know if you will come to see the film or if you are interested to get the book and DVD from us.
Best wishes
November 25, 2009 at 12:59 pm |
Hi Beatrix
Thanks for the invite, and those details. I’m sorry I won’t be able to make it – I’m very busy with fieldwork as part of the ‘Understanding Walking and Cycling’ project at the moment – doing lots of interviews, accompanied journeys and such like. (Very interesting, how this research is re-inforcing what we already know, what you too have found – that the majority of women are very reluctant to cycle in current conditions in the UK.) But I hope the premiere goes fantastically well, and a huge pat on the back to all concerned … And of course, let’s keep it going …
Best wishes
Dave