Cutting shapes: the three infrastructure projects that made modern Wellington

“God made New Zealand,” said Sir John-Pearce Luke (Mayor of Wellington from 1913-1921). “But engineers made Wellington”.

Wellington's steep terrain, regular earthquakes and ferocious weather have been constant challenges, and Sir John knew good infrastructure was critical to making our city a success. Modern sewers helped rid the city of typhoid in the 1890s, trams and tunnels opened up new suburbs after the 1900s, and the urban motorway catered for the boom in car ownership in the 1960s. But three infrastructure projects – above all others – stand out as pivotal in shaping our city.

Queens Wharf (1860s)
The wharf enables the government to move to the city after two devastating earthquakes

As SS Airedale steamed into Lambton Harbour late in the summer of 1863 the noise of is engines subsided, and sailors high in the rigging furled the canvas. Passengers eagerly lined the handrails for their first glimpse of Wellington, and the brand new Government Wharf – its reddish brown timber yet to be bleached by the sun.

Illustration by Suzanne Lustig

Eight years earlier the Wairarapa earthquake had created a three-metre tsunami, which smashed ships onto the harbour floor and washed out low-lying properties along Lambton Quay. When the waves subsided, the seabed had risen two metres, ruining access to the quays. Tectonic uplift and the destruction of wharves meant goods had to be ferried ashore by lighters – very time consuming, and the rapidly increasing size of ships visiting Wellington meant they had to anchor further and further out.

So Queens Wharf was driven by a desire to play down Wellington’s shaky start. The devastating earthquakes of 1848 and 1855 could have been fatal for the young city’s reputation, particularly given Britannia, the New Zealand Company’s original settlement at Petone had been abandoned 14 years previously because of the Hutt River’s tendency to flood. The Chamber of Commerce (then as now an advocate for infrastructure spending) campaigned for a new deepwater wharf – considered ‘a universally recognised want’, with the surviving private jetties hopelessly too small.

The new 122m-long ‘double T’ Government Wharf was a mixture of ironwork imported from Britain and totara from Foxton. Storms delayed the supply of timber and the wharf opened three months late. Stretching out from the city’s first major land reclamation around what is now Post Office Square, it quickly became known as ‘Queens Wharf’ – not in celebration of Queen Victoria’s 25 years as monarch (the first silver jubilee celebrated Kaiser Wilhelm I and was in 1886), but more likely because of its location adjacent to Queens Bond Store.

Queens Wharf was a huge vote of confidence in the 6,000-strong settlement, and a shot in the arm for business, as commercial developments rapidly filled the reclamation. It was seen as ‘a symbol that Wellington was becoming a port rather than merely a harbour,’ said Wellington Maritime Trust D Johnson, and proved so popular the ‘T’s were immediately extended to cope with the explosion of traffic.

The new wharf impressed the Australian Commissioners who visited Wellington in 1864 searching for Parliament’s new home. MPs travelled to their electorates by steamship, and our central location and modern infrastructure proved compelling: the capital moved a year later.


Tawa Flat Deviation (1930s)
Modern electric trains opened up the northern suburbs to created metropolitan 'Greater Wellington’

In the 1920s Wellingtonians enjoyed a comprehensive electric tram network connecting the city’s inner suburbs, but access from the north was far more challenging. Settlements at Johnsonville and Tawa were served by the Wellington & Manawatu Railway Company’s steep single-track railway, with steam engines wheezing through numerous tunnels as they hauled passengers up the gradients on the mainline north.

Illustration by Suzanne Lustig

For a nation with more than 28 million railway journeys each year (according to Te Ara) the trip into Wellington must have been an embarrassment. There had been little progress since the line’s construction in 1885, and the railway was a chronic bottleneck in the capital’s growth. Rail travel was critical to New Zealanders wishing to travel around the country, and arriving in the capital via a steep single track mixed up with livestock movements did not send the right signals.

The Public Works Department formed a team in 1927 under railway surveyor Arnold Downer to build an express railway over 13km long, with 5.6km of double track tunnels. Downer later led the Mt Victoria tunnel project – his name lives on in the eponymous construction company.

The Tawa Flat Deviation was completed in 1935, and allowed a major overhaul of the Johnsonville line, where cutting-edge English Electric trains were launched with fanfare (and ten speeches from the dignitaries assembled) in July 1938. The ‘delightfully smooth’ journey was completed in 16 minutes – considerably faster than today’s scheduled services. Tawa got its electric trains a couple of years later.

Eyes were firmly on the Mother Country, and the electric railway bears strikingly similarities to the ‘Metroland’ developments that turned the countryside north-west of London into prime commuter belt. Tawa’s new station offered a heated waiting room, and male and female lavatories. It was a big improvement for the passengers, and was the catalyst for the suburb’s population growth from a few hundred in 1930 to just over 3,000 shortly after the war. Johnsonville was transformed from a sleepy agricultural centre nicknamed ‘Cowtown’ to a suburb with booming property prices and a population growing at double the city’s average. Meanwhile Wellington’s neo-Georgian station, opened in 1937, bustled with passengers obtaining news from press-the-button information machines, vying for pies at the highspeed cafeteria and taking nicely-framed pictures of themselves at a shilling a shot. News, pies and selfies – nothing changes.

Enormous pride was taken in showing we could match the Empire’s best, and the Tawa Flat Deviation, track electrification, new rolling stock and the gigantic Gray Young terminus were ambitious undertakings that laid the foundation for today’s Greater Wellington conurbation.

Rongotai airport (1950s)
International connections direct to the heart of the city after removing a hill

Charles Kingsford Smith's first view of Wellington was from the cockpit of ‘Southern Cross’, his Fokker Trimotor aeroplane. The Australian circled above the city at dawn on September 11th 1928, having left Sydney 13 hours earlier, but ended his trailblazing journey in Christchurch: Wellington had nowhere suitable to land.

Illustration by Suzanne Lustig

Kingsford Smith secured his place in history by making the first international flight to New Zealand. Aged 31, he told the crowds his ambition was simply to become the world’s oldest aviator. When he finally made it to Wellington (by ship) he advised Mayor Troup – another aviation enthusiast – that Lyall Bay would be perfect for Wellington’s main aerodrome. A basic airstrip opened in 1929, which often closed over winter when the grass runway became too boggy.

Rongotai was talked about as the ideal location for our city’s main airport for years after Kingsford Smith’s untimely death in 1935, but nearby facilities proved more popular: Trentham’s airstrip handled early mail flights, the Air Force operated seaplanes from its base at Shelly Bay, and by the late 1930s Imperial Airways’ Empire flying boats were a regular sight at Evans Bay. These were the height of luxury, and passengers were often warned not to rush to the lavatories at the rear to plunder the toiletries lest the plane slid backwards out of the sky.

Meanwhile Paraparaumu became New Zealand’s busiest airport in 1949: Rongotai airport had been forced to close two years earlier as the grass runway didn’t comply with safety standards. And Tasman Empire Airways Ltd flew flying boats a four days a week to Sydney from Evans Bay in the early 1950s. The airline’s terminal at Greta Point was decidedly ad-hoc, with garages under the Casa Del Mar apartments on Evans Bay Parade used by Customs to process passengers.

Wellington was missing out. Prime Minister Peter Fraser announced in 1948 that a modern airport would be built at Rongotai, but construction took 11 long years. Passengers onboard the flying boats attempting to land when Evans Bay was choppy must have looked at the building work with longing – waves under two metres high were acceptable landing conditions.

The new Rongotai Airport necessitated moving 3,000,000m3 of earth, and reclaiming 55 hectares of land to create Cobham Drive and the new runway (which was further extended in the 1970s to accommodate passenger jets). The earthworks were impressive, but the new facilities weren’t: the 1937 De Havilland factory was repurposed as a stopgap terminal, which was intended to be replaced by the 1960s. Inevitably the corrugated shed served Wellingtonians until 1999. But the building didn’t matter – we finally had a sealed runway capable of handling the latest aircraft like the Lockheed Electra that flew the Beatles in from Sydney.

Today the decision to build a modern airport 15 minutes from the heart of the city plays a big part in the compact urban form loved by locals and visitors alike – and is every bit as transformational as the Queens Wharf and railway upgrades in previous decades.

First published in the December 2019 issue of Capital magazine

Post master: A H Fullwood visits Wellington

In the spring of 1906 a middle-aged artist sat halfway up Thompson Street with a small board balanced on his knees and a palette of oils at his side. The shades of greens he used for the quiet residential street gave way to the purples and grey of industrial Te Aro, and a skyline dominated by brick chimneys belching black smoke into a clear blue sky.

He paused to exchange some words with the driver of a horse and trap slowly clip-clopping up to Brooklyn. Decades of painting landscapes under the unrelenting Southern Hemisphere sun meant Albert Henry Fullwood’s skin was leathery and wrinkled, and thick black hair and beard added a certain wildness to his demeanour. But the speed at which Wellington materialised on the canvas was evidence of a master commercial artist working on a tight schedule to feed the first truly global craze: collecting postcards.

The city Fullwood arrived in was the bustling, confident capital of a young country that had rejected joining the Commonwealth of Australia five years earlier – and Lambton Harbour was its focal point. Ocean liners carried passengers to the far reaches of the empire, while tramp steamers and barques worked their way around the coast – the ascendancy of fire over wind not yet complete. The yachts must have caught the publisher’s eye back in London, with an approving caption on the card’s back stating the number of boat clubs meant ‘like true Britons, all the inhabitants love the sport’. And the elegantly dressed women walking their dogs unaccompanied around the Government Buildings and Molesworth Street were good material for postcard sales in Europe, with the small print reminding the world of our universal suffrage: ‘Measures that have only been talked of in other countries have been in existence in New Zealand for years’.

Fullwood’s streetscapes show the city (population 60,000) in the final year or so before the inexorable rise of automobiles – with pedestrians and cyclists mixing with horse-drawn carts. Wellington City Corporation had just taken ownership of the tram network, and the odd choice of Thompson Street for a city panorama was likely because of its proximity to the newly-opened route to Brooklyn. The electric tram would have passed hundreds of workers’ cottages packed into Te Aro Flat’s lanes – the harsh conditions of inner-city living were only a decade after the typhoid epidemics that ravaged Wellington and drove people to the safety of neighbouring boroughs like Karori. The Kelburn cable car and the Town Hall (opened in 1902 and 1904 respectively) didn’t interest him – a cynic would note the abundance of harbour and waterfront scenes were easier pickings for someone arriving by ship with little time to spare.

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Fullwood was born in Birmingham in 1863 and emigrated to Australia aged 20. He spent his next three years travelling as a staff artist for the Picturesque Atlas of Australasia, and the range of places he visited during his early career was extraordinary: Thursday Island, Torres Strait, Port Moresby, New Guinea, and later New Zealand. He married Clyda Newman in 1896. By then two of his paintings had been purchased by the Art Gallery of New South Wales.

The economic downturn and collapse of the Sydney art market at the end of the 1890s was a catalyst for travels further afield. Fullwood took his wife and their two small boys to New York, Europe and Cape Town in 1900 before setting up home in London (and having another child; a daughter) – just as the world-wide postcard craze was hitting full swing.

Collecting cards was a phenomenon in the decade before the First World War, and Raphael Tuck & Sons – a postcard publisher owned by a London-based Prussian Jewish-émigré family – were one of the biggest names in the business. In 1899 the company persuaded the British Postmaster-General that cards should be a standard size with both message and address on one side and the other side free for artwork, creating the postcard we are familiar with today – and the first truly mass media. Tuck’s ‘Wide-Wide-World’ series was launched in 1905, with bright, colourful ‘Oilette’ cards printed in Bavaria (the Tucks didn’t rate British colour printing) and exotic themes like ‘The Arctic Regions’, ‘Pleasure Resorts of Sydney’ and ‘Native Types of India’. The Oilettes were sold in sets of six scenes (half a shilling a pack) and promptly became highly collectable.

The extension of ‘Imperial Penny Post’ rates to New Zealand in 1905 helped Wellingtonians swap cards and news with friends and relatives back in the Mother Country for the equivalent of about $2 at today’s rates. Cheaper than telegrams and more widely available than telephones, the volume of mail exploded, with our post service handling 7,500,000 cards in 1909, a figure dwarfed by the estimated 1,000,000,000 cards posted in America at the same time. The General Post Office on Customhouse Quay must have been a hive of activity.

Like any rage there were detractors – Punch magazine said letter writing was being killed, mail carriers complained of exhaustion, and religious leaders condemned the ‘plague’ of cards. But it was good business for artists: the interest in collecting cards meant Tuck’s range had extended to a staggering 80,000 different cards by the time Fullwood settled his family in London. The postcard company promptly sent him back to the Antipodes to capture more scenes for the ravenous trade: the range of Fullwood’s scenes published in the 1907/08 series suggests he worked to a tight schedule in each of the cities he visited across Australasia, possibly staying in each city for two days or less. Ultimately he completed 130 Oilette scenes for Tuck. 

Postcard mania carried on unabated until war broke out with Germany in 1914. Fullwood – by now in his 50s – served in the Royal Army Medical Corps and ended up as Official War Artist to the Australian Imperial Force. His wife Clyda spent time in mental asylums before her death in 1918, and two of their children died at a young age – but Fullwood remained prolific until he succumbed to pneumonia in 1930. While never critically rated, his work was exhibited extensively during his lifetime (with multiple showings at London’s Royal Academy) and numerous paintings are held in Australia’s major state galleries. Raphael Tuck & Sons’ final hurrah was printing cards with secret escape maps for POWs during World War Two, with the destruction of the head office and artwork archive during the Blitz additional motivation for their work. The family sold the business in the late 1950s.

Fullwood’s depiction of Wellington didn’t last long. The fire that engulfed much of the Parliament Buildings in December 1907 would have happened months after Tuck published the set of Wellington cards. One card in my collection has the message ‘The houses here shown were burned four weeks ago, at present we have no Parliament House’. 

The spectacular General Post Office that towered over the adjacent masts and funnels was demolished in the 1970s, with the InterContinental Hotel building taking its place – progress, apparently. The waterfront scenes that caught the artist’s eye are a tantalising glimpse of the commercial bustle on Queens Wharf’s ‘inner T’ (now lost under the TSB Arena) that ebbed away with the rise in air travel and containerisation in the 1960s. But Fullwood’s talent for capturing cityscapes means the Wellington shared by postcard collectors over a century ago is still recognisable today – most of all, we are still a city of walkers.

First published in the November 2018 issue of Capital magazine

Bikes v Strikes

I was riding my bike home from central London earlier this week when I noticed there were a lot of black cabs snarling things up in rather a big way. ‘Ahh,’ I thought to myself. ‘That’ll be the strike over the iPhone app thing’. I pulled over to talk to a couple of friendly-looking cabbies, who filled me in as we talked about competition from Uber in the early Summer sun.

Surely The Knowledge gives them an edge over some silly piece of software, I asked the cabbies. They were adamant that they were indeed cheaper and more reliable. But apparently that wasn’t the point, as it turned out that their beef is less with Uber – which you can download at https://www.uber.com/cities/london – and more with Transport for London for allowing new entrants into the metered cab market.

Google Maps reporting traffic flows at the height of London's taxi strike

Like last year, the taxi drivers’ brief period of holding London hostage was the mother-of-all PR cock-ups. Unlike black cabs Uber drivers don’t go on strike – everyone knows that now – and making central London even tetchier by honking horns and clogging up the roads is a novel way to endear yourself to the population.

Yet as I weaved my way home on my bicycle I realised that here we had the political spectrum reduced to a single event: a monopoly administered by the Public Carriage Office snarling up London’s streets for everyone apart from those of us on two wheels, who are bound only by the Highway Code and a sense of survival (and coincidentally my closest shave in years was with a psychotic black cab a few months ago). That the police had promised arrests if the street blockades continued for any duration seemed a wonderful example of how cack-handed the state can be in resolving problems it has created.

Perhaps it is time for the Public Carriage Office’s operation to be reformed. Perhaps it is too late – Uber has joined the ranks of Google and Hoover as companies that now double up as verbs.

I haven’t taken a black cab in years, and the expense of a return trip into town on the tube still makes me wince. But here I was pedalling through Pimlico and enjoying the glorious weather with my progress unfettered by cost or regulation, while others suffered because of people getting grumpy about losing a monopoly licensed by the state.

And I pondered why cycling is associated with the lefty beard and sandals brigade. London’s Mayor and our PM both ride bikes, yet cycling is still regarded as distinctly… Huppertesque, some might say. Indeed the entire Liberal Democrat parliamentary party could ride to work on four tandems.

But cycling is a mode of transport that allows total freedom of movement, requires little government intervention and has ubiquitous vehicle ownership – all solid right wing values. The advent of the modern ‘safety cycle’ in the 1890s played a key part in the emancipation of the working class. And travel by Boris Bike spikes over Christmas and during tube strikes, occasions when state-controlled public transport fails Londoners. Tuesday’s action by black cab drivers rammed home just how inherently Tory the humble bicycle really is.

First published by Platform 10 on May 30th, 2015

The Ryanair Generation knows the EU needs reform

Reading David Cameron's Telegraph piece on his vision for a reformed European Union found me reflecting on a conversation I had a decade ago with my friend Paul. I'd been in New Zealand for the past five years and was in the final throes of packing up to move back to London. Paul was – with the help of a lot of beer – telling me what a whale of a time I was about to have.

“Europe's changed, mate,” he explained. “You can fly anywhere for a tenner. A flight to Zagreb costs less than a train ticket to Manchester. Girls, parties, culture – it'll all be on your doorstep once you're back in London.”

He was right. At the drop of a hat Michael O'Leary and Stelios did more for European integration than decades of Brussels edicts could ever have hoped for. If you're under the age of 40 you're part of the Ryanair Generation – with workmates from Poland, Hungarian girlfriends (or boyfriends), stag weekends in Prague and summers spent on the Adriatic coast.

So on the face of it Cameron's 2017 referendum isn't a big deal for us: we're more concerned about finding work, getting qualifications, the cost of transport, buying houses and falling in love. 'Banging on about Europe' isn’t on the radar.

But our international outlook also means we know just how unrealistic the whole notion of 'ever closer union' is, given our first-hand experience of the huge cultural diversity across the Continent. This sits uncomfortably with a sense that our destiny lies with Europe. The current Ukraine-Russia crisis is the perfect illustration of this dilemma. British sympathies are overwhelmingly with the pro-West faction in Ukraine, and whatever is left of Ukraine after Putin has dissected the country will be desperate to join the EU, which – given Kiev's current predicament – is entirely understandable.

The genesis of the European project lies in the formation of the European Coal and Steel Community in the aftermath of World War Two, which aimed to build security through trade. Six decades on from this the Ryanair Generation's natural instinct would normally be to welcome Ukrainian accession with open arms. Yet this is obviously not going to happen given the unitary design of today's EU, with its high barriers to entry. Ukraine is even more corrupt than Russia and its economy is smaller than Romania's, despite having double the population. Ukraine in the EU would be an administrative catastrophe, with a bonanza of passports for sale from dodgy officials, and destructive brain-drain of the country's brightest and best heading west to secure better wages and better life prospects.

As things stand full EU membership is an unrealistic dream for Ukraine, which is a pretty damning verdict on the introspective political cadre in Brussels. David Cameron's agenda for reforms has the potential to get the EU heading in a more sustainable direction, which as anyone living in Lviv or Kiev knows can't happen soon enough. The Ryanair Generation wishes him well.

First published by Bright Blue on April 7th, 2014

'Everybody rides now: the most fashionable people have taken it up!'

This is an essay I wrote during my final year as a undergraduate at UCL, and it might be of interest to anyone interested in a previous boom era for bicycles in the capital.

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How was cycling in London represented and debated in contemporary texts and illustrations of the late 19th and early 20th century?

I'm interested in how cycling was portrayed in the period between the late Victorian era and the start of the Great War, a time during which cycling moved from relative novelty to an accepted part of London's transport landscape – and a far cry from the advent of the velocipede half a century earlier, when ugly scenes were common: 'In London, one unfortunate 'velocipeder' found himself surrounded by a hostile mob. He frantically hailed a stagecoach, flung his machine on its rooftop, jumped in, and sped off to safety (Herlihy 2006:34). More worryingly, the London College of Surgeons had spoken out against the machines which were 'dangerous to the rider and likely to cause 'ruptures': only a fool would persist' (2006:38).

The 1880s saw the bicycle evolve from being a 'boneshaker' into something with which today's machines share a clear lineage, and Rubenstein identifies two important innovations that brought about the transformation. John Kemp Starley's 'Rover' safety bicycle (illustration 1) had both wheels of similar size, a feature that was advertised as 'set to fashion the world' (1977:48) after it was launched in 1885, with its diamond-shaped frame saving riders from 'mounting a thing like a giraffe, from which an impromptu descent offers unpleasant possibilities' (Herlihy 2006:167). Likewise Dunlop's pneumatic tyre dominated the market after it was introduced in 1888, and Rubenstein argues that these improvements meant that 'cycling could become a method of transport and recreation suitable to both sexes and most ages. Men and women who sought increased social emancipation were eagerly and gratefully to take advantage of what invention and mass production made possible' (1977:48). No longer a curiosity, bicycles were ready for the masses.

Illustration 1: John Kemp Starley's 'Rover' safety bicycle
(Coventry Transport Museum)

These innovations helped facilitate increasingly impressive feats of athleticism. Events that pitted cyclists against horses remained popular until relatively late in the day – English champion David Stanton famously taking on a trap drawn by 'Lady Flora' and her driver Mr. MacDonald at Alexandra Palace in 1875 (Herlihy 2006:165). However Stanton also raced in that same year between London and Bath, covering the distance in just under 12 hours, and demonstrating that bicycles were going to be a realistic transport proposition for many (Herlihy 2006:179). 20 years later Wandsworth's 'Grove Cycling Club' was holding weekly rides of 30-50 miles into the Surrey Hills (illustration 2), which would have been made much easier by the developments in bicycle technology in the intervening two decades.

Illustration 2: The 1897 fixtures card for Wandsworth's 'Grove Cycling Club'
(Museum of London)

Social acceptance of the bicycle was transformed in the last decades of the 19th Century, and Rubenstein describes how in 1895 'popularity became passion', with the ladies of London's high society transforming attitudes towards bicycles amidst a wider bicycle craze. This change was noted by Victorian cycling journalist Constance Everett-Green, who observed that 'it would hardly be too much to say that in April of 1895 one was considered eccentric for riding a bicycle, whilst by the end of June eccentricity rested with those who did not ride.' (Rubinstein 1977:49). Horrall notes that even the least athletic Londoners were keen to be associated with cycling: 'the rotund Sir Augustus Harris, the legendary manager of the Drury Lane Theatre who had created the modern Christmas Pantomime, was photographed outside his home dressed in a business suit leaning uneasily against a bicycle' (2001:55). Women speeding around on two wheels did – however – raise some eyebrows, with Herbert Barrs writing a musical comedy called 'The bicycle girl', which he subtitled salaciously 'The scorcher'! (Horrall 2001:55).

Rubinstein estimates that this period would have seen about 750,000 bicycles built annually, with the number of cycle manufacturing and repair businesses in London growing from 54 in 1889 to 390 in 1897 (1977:53). Despite ebbing popularity after the 1895-97 boom, cycling remained commonplace, with business confidence in the industry holding up, particularly given that 'the cheap mobility offered by bicycles, specially in emancipating women, was resolutely most popular with the lower middle classes' (Horrall 2001:60-61).

This sense of freedom runs through a wonderful interview the Manchester Guardian's correspondent conducted with John Burns (Independent Socialist MP for Battersea) at the start of the 1900 General Election:

Anxious to see Battersea on the eve of the greatest struggle in its history, I had ridden south-west to the silver Thames, crossed that beautiful park, with its smooth roads, its ample playing fields, and large calm waters, and had emerged in the Battersea Road (The Guardian: online).

The journalist's choice of words are incredibly evocative of freedom and effortless transport in a city that was growing rapidly, and over a century later they still place me firmly in the saddle of a bicycle, particularly as the piece continues:

He was riding towards me on his bicycle, the handlebars decked with a bunch of blue and white ribbons; alert, robust, radiant with confident strength. He greeted me with a gay smile, and, riding side by side, we left the crowds of his too urgent followers and glided into a quieter street (ibid.).

These passages suggests that the roads of Battersea were smooth and well maintained, which adds to the sense of working class pride in the area being toured, with the journalist adding that 'there is little or no squalor, and in this district in the Shaftesbury estate you have a model of how poor men should live well - small, neat cottages, prettily built, each with a gift of "home" for the occupants' (The Guardian: online) – all very much in keeping with the newspaper's socially progressive outlook. Here the bicycle is an accepted, inconsequential part of city life – even with Burns' ribbons festooned on his bicycle – but it also an important tool for the London correspondent's carrying out his daily rounds: this ability to move around the city is highlighted by the description how the pair 'left the villas, crossed the main road and entered the working-class district with that swiftness of transition which makes life on a bicycle so vastly exhilarating and entertaining' (ibid.). The passage also points out how bicycles are able to break down social barriers as they enable people move (and see) other parts of the city far more easily than if they were on foot.

As a cycling member of parliament Burns was able to cover his constituency quickly, and this helped him to build his reputation as one of London's great MPs – he represented Battersea from 1892 to 1918, and today one of the Woolwich ferries is named after him. But the ability to cover ground also meant he was the first on hand when a woman died from heat exhaustion in Battersea Park in 1896 (see illustration 3).

Illustration 3: The death of Mrs. Hodgkins, erroneously depicting a policeman as the first to offer assistance
(Illustrated Police News)

However the cover mistakenly has a policeman assisting the dying woman, which was incorrect:

It was not a policeman named Burns, who first went to the assistance of the unfortunate lady, but John Burns, the member for Battersea, was but a few yards distant, and as might be expected, he at once endeavored to render what help he could, but alas! it was already too late to render any material assistance. (The Wheelwoman and Society Cycling News 1896:15)

The picture shows a rider – presumably male, given the practical clothing – disappearing off in the distance, and this suggests that by 1896 women were able to ride alone without raising eyebrows. Alternatively the point could be somewhat more barbed: despite the freedom of being on two wheels, society is still leaving women behind, encumbered with expectations that are far short of reality. Regardless, the event was reported by the 'Wheelwoman and Society Cycling News' as a 'warning at the heads of wheel women, not to cycle during hot days', with the journal advising that:

Unsuitable clothes, combined with too tight corsets, were more to blame perhaps than the heat. There is nothing more fatal to the health and comfort in cycling than tight lacing, and yet hundreds of women, to whom Nature has been kind in giving them good figures, torture themselves and all lovers of beauty by cramping themselves into clothes that are many inches too small for them. (The Wheelwoman and Society Cycling News 1896:6)

The Illustrated Police News – a cheap weekly tabloid – was notorious for its sensationalized coverage of late Victorian society, and its depiction of the last moments of Mrs. Hodgkins is highly dramatic, yet rich with detail: the details of her corset are captured, as is the shocked expression on the onlooking' faces. There is a tragic contrast between the practicality of her bicycle – with skirt protector covering the rear wheel and chain guard protecting her from grease – and the billowing clothing she is wearing. While her outfit seems impractical to the modern eye, the contemporary report suggests that her dress sense on two wheels was commonplace, and that Mrs. Hodgkins was merely unlucky to be be afflicted by the heat. Indeed, contemporary issues of the Illustrated London News carried advertisements for tailor-made women's cycling clothing (illustration 4), although this still looks constricted, suggesting that practicality came second fiddle to fitting into late 19th Century London's social norms. It is encouraging to see that the Wheelwoman and Society Cycling News's report encouraged women to dress practically, and not for broader social expectations. 118 years on I imagine a comparable journal today would be firmly behind people wearing lycra on their ride to and from work!

Illustration 4: Women's cycling clothing in the mid-1890s
(Illustrated London News)

Despite this tragic episode, Horrall's argument that bicycles were particularly significant in the emancipation of women is borne out by contemporary material. Elizabeth Robins Pennell was an American woman who lived in London for 30 years, and from 1884 she embarked on a series of adventurous cycle tours with her husband – first to Canterbury, but increasingly further afield, including “Berlin to Budapest on a bicycle' in 1892 (illustration 5). These were published in the Illustrated London News, and her accounts would have fired up London's women to greater degrees of independence – after all, if the author could handle Berlin's railway porters the readership would have no trouble with adventures closer to home. And her male audience would also have been impressed with her exploits – Robins Pennell wrote in the first person, clearly distinguishing her experiences from those of her husband Joseph when she writes 'I have told J––––'s story of his adventures by the way; now I must tell you mine' (Robins Pennell 1892:766). This clear assertion shows that she was her own woman, and her cycling adventures around London and further afield were part of her independent image.

Illustration 5: Berlin to Budapest on a bicycle (Illustrated London News)

Back in London Robins Pennell entertained the likes of Oscar Wilde and George Bernard Shaw (Bertelsen 2009), suggesting that she was something of a celebrity journalist, and a trendsetter among London's women cyclists. Robins Pennell was certainly a keen advocate of following cycling technology, having switched in 1886 from a two-person tricycle that she shared with her husband to an early single person safety bicycle (Zheutlin 2008:33). Together with women like Annie 'Londonderry' Cohen Copchovsky (the first woman to 'ride' around the world) Robins Pennell fired up the imagination of the growing suffragette movement back in London, and entwining an enjoyable means of transport around London with the politics of women seeking the right to vote.

By 1898 the suffragette Frances Abbott was in a position to write:

I have lived to see the woman who never wished her daughter to have a bicycle ride a wheel herself in company with that daughter; and when I ventured to recall her former opinions she said with unblushing serenity: ‘Oh, well, everybody rides now; the most fashionable people have taken it up; there is really nothing like it’, and she began to chide me because I did not own a wheel. (1898:150)

The early 1900s saw a renaissance in the women's suffrage movement, and its campaigns produced highly evocative material that aimed – with varying degrees of subtlety – to make the case for female enfranchisement. The National Union of Women's Suffragette Societies (NUWSS) made long journeys to London by bicycle, and Illustration 6 shows the successful women of such a ride in 1913 surrounded by others in the movement. It portrays them in a manner similar to regimental and sports photos, and photographs like this demonstrate both the resilience and adventurousness of these women in making such a long ride, set in terms that men – used to team photos – would appreciate. The banner also lays down a direct challenge, explicitly pointing out that women have achieved something that only a few decades earlier would have been an accomplishment for the likes of champion rider David Stanton.

Illustration 6: NUWSS Land's End to London ride (The Women's Library)

Photographs were used to present reality and challenge conservative thought, but the early 1900s saw also propaganda artwork from the likes of the Artist's Suffrage League, which was based in Chelsea. 'Young New Zealand' (Illustration 7) points out that women in the newest of the Empire's Dominions had enjoyed universal suffrage since 1893. The poster taps into the public's acceptance of women cyclists, with a girl representing 'Young New Zealand' dressed in practical clothes, rather than the excess that seemingly did for Mrs. Hodgkins. And by having her hand in her pocket the poster suggests the girl has a laid back mastery of her machine, as poking fun at the social expectations of the 1900s – represented by the hatted man.

Illustration 7: Artists' Suffrage League propaganda from 1907 (Museum of London)

But it also plays on the evolution of the bicycle, as anyone walking out of the Artists' Suffrage League offices on the King's Road would have waited a long time for a penny farthing to pass by – by that point they were obselete. The limited enfranchisement of British women to vote in municipal elections in 1907 is acknowledged by the small rear wheel of the penny farthing, but the ungainly appearance of the man riding his bicycle rams home the Artists' Suffrage League main point – not giving women the vote smacks of the 1880s, a bygone era.

Looking back over the contemporary material bicycles clearly represent the zeitgeist of London during the late Victorian and Edwardian eras. Cycling tapped into the British spirit of industrial innovation, with the pneumatic tyre making riding on two wheels something for all, rather than a few hardy souls capable of enduring the 'boneshaker'. But they also represented social change, with the surge in 'wheelwomen' initially demonstrating that they were more than capable of exercising the freedom inherent in riding a bike, and subsequently pouring fuel on the nascent suffragette movement.

Yet the idea of a cycling 'craze' seems a little hard to reconcile. Certainly bicycle popularity exploded in the mid-1890s, but it was a popularity that endured well into the era of the motor car, and looking at the material a century later it is easy to match the sensationalist, judgmental coverage of Mrs. Hodgkins' death with that of the spate of cyclist deaths in late 2013, and the sometimes excitable coverage that bike riding received in London's media – much in the spirit of the Illustrated Police News.


References

Abbott, F. (1898) ‘A comparative view of the woman suffrage movement’ North American Review 166(495) p.142–152

Anonymous (1896) The Wheelwoman and Society Cycling News, 1st August p.6, 15. Available at: http://www.newspapers.com/newspage/34415508/ [Accessed: 11 Jan 2014].

Bertelsen, C. (2009) 'A greedy woman: the long, delicious shelf life of Elizabeth Robins Pennell' Fine Books Magazine, 44 Available at: http://www.finebooksmagazine.com/issue/200908/pennell-1.phtml [Accessed: 12th January 2014].

Herlihy, D. (2006) 'Bicycle: the history' New Haven: Yale University Press

Horrall, A (2001) 'Popular culture in London 1890-1918: the transformation of entertainment' Manchester: Manchester University Press

Robins Pennell, (1892) 'Berlin to Budapest on a Bicycle' Illustrated London News 1892:766

Rubinstein, D. (1977) 'Cycling in the 1890s' Victorian Studies 21(1) p.47-71

The Guardian (1900) 'A bicycle interview with John Burns, Battersea's man to beat' London: The Guardian Available at: http://www.theguardian.com/theguardian/2012/oct/02/john-burns-battersea-cycling-archive-1900 [Accessed: 9th January 2014].

Zheutlin,P. (2008) 'Around the World on Two Wheels: Annie Londonderry's Extraordinary Ride' New York: Citadel Press

The Camino offers an insight into the European debate

The Camino de Santiago is the historic pilgrimage route across northern Spain, and as a cultural melting pot it had the recent misfortune of being dramatised as a ghastly film, packed with characters you’d normally walk a long way to escape.

Fortunately the reality is much better, and when I walked the 650 miles from Lourdes to Finisterre this summer the sole person I consciously avoided was an American college kid who sauntered along singing at the top of his voice while emitting a powerful body odour. That he was dressed only in boxer shorts with feathers in his dreadlocks didn’t help matters.

Nonetheless it’s the people who make the Camino a lifetime experience, and offering some wonderful insights into the differences in mentalities across Europe and further afield. I spent the first week plodding across the Pyrenean foothills in endless rain, without seeing a single soul walking west. Company came in the form of random encounters with the locals, particularly around meals. A priest from India at the Bétharram Monastery wanted to talk about the great batsmen his country had produced as we drank broth seated on the long benches of the refectory, with the other monks completely confused until we moved on rugby. And the waiter at one of the bistros who resignedly acknowledged that the French way of life was doomed, which seemed pretty reasonable given that most shops seemed only to be open for a couple of hours in the morning, and with local farms still almost pre-industrial in their miniature form.

On the morning of my third day the butcher in Arundy attached a large scallop shell (the traditional symbol of pilgrims en route to Santiago) to my pack, and from then onwards every boulangerie was a chance to warm up and talk to the intrigued locals, although saying I was walking to Santiago felt fraudulent given that Galicia was still a fair few mountain ranges – and 1000km – away.

So making it to the popular starting point of St. Jean Pied-de-Port after a week on the road was a bit of a relief. Passing through the town’s fortified Porte St. Jacques I was met by a cacophony of languages, frenzied unwrapping of new equipment and nervous anticipation of the first major challenge of the main Camino: following Napoleon’s steep route over the Pyrenees. The sharp early morning climb wasn’t brutal enough to stop the wild hand gestures and emotional outpourings of the girl from California. Nor did it stifle conversation with the chain-smoking chap from Stuttgart, who didn’t understand that a ‘C’ in GCSE German meant my grasp of his language was limited to menus and the occasional war film, and constructing sentences with ‘potato salad’ and ‘hands up’ didn’t seem conducive to the spirit of the walk, or European harmony.

The route itself is inherently cultural rather than deeply scenic, but that’s part of the joy of traversing a large country – you take the rough with the smooth. The back streets of Spain’s isolated villages revealed some of the Iberian Peninsula’s desperate poverty, interspersed with stonkingly beautiful towns: medieval Viana, where Cesare Borgia is buried, was particularly pretty. Dormitories ranged from charmless municipal accommodation to the isolated medieval pilgrims’ hostels where Mass was celebrated by candlelight. And of course the mountains of Galicia were spectacular, more than making up for the afternoon spent walking past Burgos airport and endless kilometres trudging along roadside footpaths.

Hours of conversation with my fellow pilgrims (very few of them British) as we passed though countless settlements also hammered home some important cultural differences. Dutch incredulity at Spain’s lavish yet half-built motorways that intersected our route. The abundance of hairdressers in the smallest of French villages, and American bewilderment at poor European service. The spectacular mountain settlement of La Faba that was run by a German confraternity, where for the first time in weeks I enjoyed a clean shower that worked, with immaculate bunks and a laundry service, my thanks for which were met with a blank “What else did you expect? We are German!”

There were – of course – frequent sightings of flagpoles flying the gold stars of the European Union. I pointed out to my Spanish companion that this enthusiasm would be unthinkable in England, much to his surprise. “Really?” he asked. “Surely we’re all brothers? Aren’t you proud of Europe in the UK?” I felt awful breaking it to him that back in Blighty the EU is seen as a cousin at best – the sort you hear very little from during the year, before agonising about deleting from the family Christmas card list.

First published by Egremont on November 6th, 2013. Read the daily blog I wrote while walking the Camino at matthewsoccasionaladventures.blogspot.co.uk

Heathrow to Stansted by train: not as expensive as you’d think

In some ways Heathrow’s third runway is like giving your wife an incredibly expensive diamond necklace when you realise your marriage is on the rocks. It will buy you some short term goodwill, but ultimately you’re still in trouble. The £10 billion third runway project might well stimulate some work in the boom-and-bust construction industry, but it does little to address the fundamentals of growth, or indeed offer a long term solution to London’s need for airport capacity: it is lazy policy.

So instead of looking at expensive, shiny baubles, the government’s review should concentrate on getting the basics right: remembering to put the rubbish out, cooking more often, or in the case of London’s airports, making sure they are used more efficiently. Considering an expensive runway as a short term fix to Heathrow’s woes seems mad when you consider that Stansted is running at 50% capacity, with the space for more terminal buildings that would linked seamlessly into existing motorway and rail infrastructure.

The problem is that getting between London’s airports is utterly nightmarish – as anyone who has trekked across the capital to catch a connecting flight knows. Slow bus journeys around the M25 are the order of the day: not exactly reassuring if you have a tight schedule, and hardly an advertisement for modern Britain. The logical solution would be a Heathrow-Stansted rail link, yet this would obviously be a wickedly expensive option given the distance involved.

But curiously enough we already have all the infrastructure in place to operate such a service.

Re-laying the track on a disused rail chord south of Tottenham Hale is all that stands in the way of running trains between the two airports. The Gospel Oak – Barking line is a busy railway, but improved passing loops and signalling would allow passengers to transfer in about 70 minutes.

The disused rail chord

The work could be delivered as part of the already proposed capacity improvements to the Stansted Express, and for a tiny fraction of the £10 billion required for Heathrow’s short term third runway solution. The connection at West Hampstead would link to Thameslink’s Luton and Gatwick services, and Willesden Junction would give access to the new HS2 interchange. It wouldn’t be too much of a leap in imagination to see a ‘London Airport Connect’ service quickly becoming popular for both transfer journeys and passengers travelling to and from west London.

If looking at airport strategy is indeed a completely open-minded exercise, then there is the potential to shift the political consensus from a negative (a wasteful short term fix at Heathrow) to a positive (creating a long term solution – potentially building Boris Island in the Thames Estuary).

This process will be drawn out, with either solution decades away. The fine tuning of our existing facilities should start without delay – and with the imagination and flair that London desperately needs.

First published by Platform 10 on September 10th, 2012

Photographing a pilgrimage

I wrote this piece for the Ampleforth Lourdes Pilgrimage's 2009 fundraising carol service to explain why I had joined them that year to take photos. I've been back to Lourdes with them each year since, travelling as my disabled cousin's carer, and continuing to document the Pilgrimage's work. You can see a slideshow of the work I produced from 2009 here.

Most of the Ampleforth pilgrimages to Lourdes since 1980 have involved one (or more) members of my family. This year there were four of us. The Plummer clan's previous would be reasonable grounds for suspecting me of a) having an interest in cameras, and b) being a committed Lourdie. Rewind three years though, and things were rather different.

Dad's Catholicism is half-hearted at best. Likewise, the one time I remember him with a camera was shooting five minutes of video in the Disneyworld carpark before realising the lens cap was still on. Mum is agnostic, the result of attending Wellington's Convent of the Sacred Heart school, where the nuns excelled in producing well educated women with little interest in God. Both made huge sacrifices to give me a fantastic education, which I mention to balance the distinct lack of enthusiasm they had for my early attempts with a cartridge film camera given me for my 6th birthday. I can clearly recall Mum saying that she wasn't buying me any more film because all I did was take dull pictures that were a waste of money to develop. Looking back, she was right.

In the following two decades my contact with Catholicism was pretty much limited to Dad's insistence that I received my First Communion. I remember filling my gold-covered communion workbook with drawings of the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster and Richard Branson's trans-Atlantic speedboat, so it's a safe bet to say the date was late in the summer of 1986. And in retrospect my first confession of 'being mean to my sister' seems rather sweet.

But as I got older something about God didn't click, and I was lucky that my housemaster at Westminster was sympathetic to my boycott of school church services. And having talked to Dad about belief I decided that enough was enough. I walked up to St. Augustine's – where I had been christened 19 years earlier – and told the bewildered Father on duty that I'd come to resign from the Church.

At this point a pilgrimage to Lourdes seemed an unlikely prospect. But with my parents working full-time I'd grown up spending a lot of time with my aunt Elizabeth Plummer and her boys Rupert, Mark, Andrew and Richard. Trying to figure out why people I loved (and who I considered sane) were interested in what Mum described as 'a week of God-bothering and anointing each other in the fields' was a tricky one. A detour though Lourdes during a camping holiday in the Pyrenees – and the abiding memory of umpteen gift-shops selling plastic Virgin Mary waterbottles – added to the confusion.

And so to the 21st Century. Digital cameras meant I was free to learn and experiment with my photography, and 12 months ago I finished two years of photography school. My final year was spent documenting New Zealand's newly decriminalised sex industry, and it dawned on me that the camera is a powerful tool for accessing places that are far from the everyday. Personal projects are a key part of a photographer's portfolio and career development, and so with my cousin Rupert's encouragement I rang Anna Mayer [the Pilgrimage Director]. For me, the week would be a chance to finally see Ampleforth's pilgrims at work, and in return I'd offer the Pilgrimage a detailed visual record of 2009 in Lourdes. Having been given the green light, I remember Richard chuckling when I asked him if we'd be attending Mass more than a couple of times during the week.

45 rolls of Kodak Tri-X later, and with a month of developing and scanning late into the night, I have a much better idea of what the pilgrimage is about. Lourdes is a wonderful place, where people (if not gift shops) are at their best. I don't think my views on God have changed, but the profound impact of Jesus as a teacher of decency and kindness is manifest. The patience and humour of the sick and healthy together is wonderful, with the ward party on the final night unexpectedly moving. Being a pilgrim with Ampleforth this year was a privilege – thank you!