A Cyclist on the English Landscape

[Eric Marth]

Very nice series of cycling self-portraits by Roff Smith in the New York Times today. 

Part of the lovely feature series World Through a Lens. Worth exploring :) 

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/05/travel/sussex-bicycle-portraits.html?action=click&module=Editors%20Picks&pgtype=Homepage

[Marty Gierke, Stewartstown PA]

Now that is inspiring - especially the part about all these photos taken within ten miles of home. Might be a challenge I am willing to accept. 

Thanks for posting the link Eric.

Marty 

[Eric Marth]

I couldn't believe there were so many pictures, more and more as I kept scrolling! Glad you liked it, Marty. 

[David Person]

He used to have a really nice blog called my-bicycle-and-I, that has now gone the way of many cycling blogs.  He would post lots of beautiful pictures of his rides in the south of England.

[Yankeebird]

But what's the bike?!

[Eric Marth]

Looks like he has an active instagram page and a blog: http://www.theartoftheride.com/

On Monday, April 5, 2021 at 4:18:51 PM UTC-4 David Person wrote:

[Eric Marth]

Yankeebird: From his blog: "I have three bicycles but the one that appears in nearly every image  is an old-school tourer custom-built for me some years ago by Mark Reilly (now of Reilly Cycleworks) back when he was the master builder for Enigma. Assisting him at the time was Matthew Sowter, now of Saffron Frameworks. So you could say it has a pedigree of the best of British framebuilding."

[Philip Barrett]

I saw that today, my parents live about a mile from him! 

It's an interesting part of the world blessed with the nicest climate in the UK (which is a bit like saying it's a light Rivendell). But unlike other South Coast towns with excellent rail links to London whose popularity and property values have skyrocketed, poor Hastings is served by an old, slow & unreliable rail service which eliminates all but the hardiest commuter from the area. Left over from it's heyday as THE place to see & be seen are huge Victorian piles, many of which have been broken up into small apartments and are used for social housing. Not a bad place to live on the dole, there's beaches and the weather is perfectly tolerable but obviously the downside to this is the same that can be seen in places like San Francisco or Portland.

However, surrounding Hastings & St. Leonards are some of the most exclusive retirement towns, Bexhill is one that he mentioned, 8 miles down the road and and incredibly pricey. Eastbourne is the next major town West with a similar makeup & if you head East you get to the ancient fishing port of Rye, an incredibly picturesque village with a tidal harbor & medieval homes.

So in a small geographic area you have photographer's paradise. Run down Victorian and Art Deco combine with an old town dating from the 1500s and before, Tudor pubs and mystical salt marshes, beautiful beaches and a highly photogenic local fishing industry where rusty bulldozers launch gaily painted wooden boats into the surf directly from the beach. With the hard light coming from the sea or the soft misty sprays I find new subjects every time I visit.

 For cycling, all I can say is, be prepared for hills almost of San Francisco proportions in places! Even with those, it's a very popular town and seafront for 2 wheel vehicles of both the motorized and non-motorized type and is infamous for the running Mods vs. Rockers battles fought on it's beaches in the 60s!

 

[Philip Barrett]

A few more...

[David Person]

Thanks for the link, Eric.

http://www.theartoftheride.com/

[Patrick Moore]

This is a very good set of photographs, and the author writes very well, too; a rather rare combination in cycling journalism, where bike info is vitiated by stunted outlook and expression. It's rather sad to see the decay of so many English regions that I've read about in their heyday (spent 16 years or so of my long-ago boyhood in ex-Crown colonies and traveling thru Britain on home leave). Paul Theroux's "The Kingdom By The Sea" comes to mind, as do Bill Bryson's "Notes From A Small Island" and "The Road To Little Dribbling" as do years spent reading British novelists and social historians.

Philip: Are you English? Or, how did your parents end up there? (BTW, you don't write badly yourself. And, are the attached photos yours? Well done.)

 All these images were captured within a 10-mile radius of where I live, and most of them much closer than that.

Here's an idea for a thread: post your photos from rides within a 10 mile radius of your home. It would be very interesting to see a variety of landscapes accessible out the door by bicycle. I'll take some and post them, but be forewarned that rating my photo skills as rudimentary is excessive praise.

And, oh, please! Adjust the size of any photo you paste into an email so that it does not expand the content grossly beyond the normal width of the page; or simply attach instead of pasting.

Philip: You say "nice climate" in the UK is an oxymoron, but isn't English weather at least rather mild overall, compared to the highs and lows and droughts and floods and tornados in North America? I guess a lot of cold rain makes up for a great deal of moderate temperature differentials ...

Patrick "Anglophile" Moore, who has thoroughly enjoyed the "Foyle's War" series set in Hastings.

[Philip Barrett]

Thanks Patrick, flattery will get you everywhere! I really like your idea of the 10 mile photo project, I shall wait until the Platypus is built up to embark on that. I just added vitiated to my repertoire too!

I was born in London and we moved around the UK quite a bit, including a stint in Brighton ("Hove actually") long before it became a bijou domicile fueled by the "Pink Pound" and emigrating to the US 36 years ago in my early 20's so I sort of span both countries. Perhaps Roger Waters said it best with "hanging on in quiet desperation is the English way?" It's a country that has never really defined itself post Empire and two terrible wars. Hastings actually featured as a fashionable backdrop to the Edwardian hedonism ignoring the world changing around them. The Europe experiment has gone terribly wrong and the penchance for a sort of pornography of nostalgia worries me somewhat. However we should temper the pity party with the fact that the UK still rates #6 for world GDP and boasts many of it's billionaires.

And yes, the English climate is the butt of many jokes and like the food, tales of it's awfulness are somewhat exaggerated. It does rain a lot, however US Mid-West/North East levels of cold are unknown and the summers are mild compared to the US in general. A sunny day in the UK countryside is hard to match anywhere, if they were more frequent it would be even better.

We loved Foyle's War too. Hastings took an awful battering during the Blitz as damaged (or scared) bombers would cross the channel and drop their loads on the 1st bit of Britain they found before turning for home. Inevitably, with a mere 22 miles to travel from the French coast, Hastings bore the brunt of that. My Great Aunt claims that as a girl a Luftwaffe plane banked so low over the town the pilot waved at her!