Bicycle Thieves
Anna Aslanyan
The Pickwick Bicycle Club first met on 22 June 1870, a fortnight after Charles Dickens’s death, at a hotel in Hackney. The club continues to function and the building still stands on the edge of Hackney Downs.
One evening a few years ago, walking across the park, a friend and I saw a woman lying on the path next to her bike. A group of youngsters jumped out of nowhere, she told us, knocked her off and ran away. We helped her to the nearest bench – her ankle was badly hurt – and stayed with her until a policeman arrived. He took our details but didn’t sound very hopeful about catching the culprits.
The number of bike journeys in London increased this year to an estimated 1.33 million a day. My current bike has been my main means of transport for the past four and a half years. Days after I bought it someone tried to drill through the D-lock but a neighbour chased them off. Various parts of it have been stolen; replacing them has cost me more than I paid for the machine in the first place.
‘Thieves are getting smarter,’ a bike mechanic told me. ‘They know what’s expensive and they look for these parts.’ He showed me a pair of gear shifters worth £900, which could be removed relatively easily: you just need to unscrew the stem bolt and cut through the brake cables. That’s what happened to my bicycle last year (my shifters would have fetched much less than £900). The mechanic never parks his bike outside: ‘I don’t even have a lock.’
Reasonably priced parts are increasingly hard to find (Brexit doesn’t help). Someone I know recently spotted a man carrying a bike, its wheels locked together, across a road in North London. He took pictures of the man, who put on a balaclava and went over to a group waiting nearby. ‘There were lots of cars around,’ my informant said. ‘No one intervened.’ He contacted the police but never heard back.
Another mechanic told me that he and his colleagues check the BikeRegister database when they think a bike brought to them might have been stolen. The red flags include mismatched parts, such as an expensive frame with cheap handlebars. Several bicycles have been returned to their owners this way.
One person I spoke to told me that his cargo bike was stolen from a ‘secure’ storage space below his apartment. While he is ‘privileged enough’ to be able to replace it, he said, cycling should be affordable for everyone. ‘Londoners are still much more likely to cycle if they are white, male, non-disabled, younger, from higher income households or live closer to central London,’ according to the latest communication from the London Cycling Campaign. The campaigners are calling on the mayor and councils to ‘make a bike available to every Londoner’ in 2025.
I locked my bike outside Euston Tower before going to see 20,000 by Cameron Griffin, an installation whose title refers to the average number of bikes reported stolen in London every year. Griffin used a selection of distorted locks, as well as his own bicycle, attached to a tall metal structure with a light at the top. Researching the project, he photographed mangled bicycles and collected statements from people who’d had theirs stolen. They spoke of feeling ‘heartbroken’, ‘angry and upset’, ‘saddened and shocked’. (After visiting the exhibition I found my bike intact where I’d left it.)
Losing your bike in London is not the end of the world; having a cycling accident can be. While the number of road fatalities in the city has been decreasing, individual deaths – six cyclists this year – cannot be subsumed in statistics. In September 2023 Harry Webb and Gao Gao were killed in Hackney within days of each other. Transport for London aims to eliminate deaths and serious injuries by 2041. New standards for lorries, which are involved in half of cycling fatalities in London, were introduced in October to improve visibility.
The LCC maintains a map of the capital’s twenty most dangerous junctions. Pembury Circus in Hackney doesn’t make the list though it’s notorious among local cyclists. The council has come up with what Hackney Cycling Campaign calls a ‘dangerous redesign’. The campaigners’ own proposal, supported by Webb’s parents, was rejected. Garmon ap Garth, the campaign co-ordinator, said the approved design ‘prioritises aesthetics over safety’. Rob Coates, who worked on the alternative proposal, described the council’s argument that ‘they need to maximise the “placemaking” at a junction which will carry over ten thousand vehicles per day’ as ‘ludicrous’.
A London policeman is unlikely to ask: ‘Is it about a bicycle?’ One Met officer told me they take bike theft seriously but admitted that most such crimes go unsolved. They sometimes stop people with bikes that appear ‘too expensive’, she said (in other words, people who appear ‘too poor’), and visit shops that ‘look dodgy’, though there isn’t much you can prove about a secondhand bike.
At a webinar last month, Mike Daly of the Met’s Cycle Safety Team referred to a survey conducted among women cyclists in London. More than 90 per cent of respondents have been abused by other road users. Daly encouraged everyone to report any incidents to help the police ‘identify hotspots’ and reallocate resources.
London cyclists are long used to road rage. In a History of the Pickwick Bicycle Club (1905), ‘the Hon. Mr Crushton’ describes an incident from 1876 to demonstrate ‘the feelings of bitter animosity with which riders of cycles were regarded by drivers of horses’. Two cyclists, Mr Gee and Mr Mitchell, tried to overtake a coach. The driver ‘commenced driving across and across the road to prevent Gee passing, and … laid into him with a whip’; the guard ‘was worse still, for this diabolical miscreant was armed with a murderous weapon, consisting of an iron ball attached to the end of a cord, intended no doubt for the destruction of cyclists in general’. Gee escaped unharmed, but ‘Mitchell … and his machine were hurled to the ground, and both dragged for some distance.’ The book doesn’t say where it happened, but it could have been Pembury Circus.
Comments
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31 December 2024
at
4:01pm
Aron
says:
I've had six bikes stolen in the UK over the last thirteen years. Of these three were correctly D-locked; once the thieves left the cut D-lock there, and twice they left no evidence behind. I left one bike in the hallway of my home unlocked, foolishly, although it had made it through a year OK. One bike was D-locked to a signpost overnight: the thieves knocked off the sign and must have just lifted the bike over. And the first bike I left unlocked over summer inside my college. In Japan where I'd lived previously I'd never even owned a lock: there was no need. The police used to call me to return my wallet when I lost it. All the money would be there too, down to the last yen.
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31 December 2024
at
6:18pm
R Srinivasan
says:
The geniuses who thought up exploding pagers will think of something to stop would-be bicycle thieves. Exploding D-locks?
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1 January 2025
at
1:20pm
Alan Johnson
says:
No to mandatory reg, the priority should be on increasing cycling, not presenting further obstacles when traffic and road rage already put off most people.
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1 January 2025
at
3:56pm
R Srinivasan
says:
@
Alan Johnson
Bicycles were "an indispensable piece of military hardware" in the Japanese invasion of Malaya in WWII.
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1 January 2025
at
5:25pm
Ander Broadman
says:
@
R Srinivasan
The commando Peter Masters was attached to a troop of bicyclists on D-Day whose job was to race from the beach to Pegasus Bridge. Peter made it, with some incidents along the way, though I believe he was pleased to leave the bike behind for the rest of his war.
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2 January 2025
at
8:26pm
steve kay
says:
@
Ander Broadman
The other possible veteran bicycle anoraks have gone very quiet. BSA made large numbers of folding bicycles for use by paratroopers, between 1942 and 1945. Certainly not cheap and merely disposable, numbers of working survivors can be seen in use in the summer.
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2 January 2025
at
10:34am
Graucho
says:
Norman Tebbit would surely approve of their enterprise.
Read moreIt takes about a minute to cut through a lock with an angle grinder, even a really heavy-duty one, which can cost £80-100. For a while I had insurance but after you lose three bikes they don't insure you any more. These days I never leave a bike locked outside overnight. The main thing is to stuff it in a taxi when you get a puncture.
I also use both a D-lock and a thick, heavy chain. Thieves could still get through both quite easily; the best defence is easier-to-steal bikes nearby. It's also advisable not to buy very nice bikes.
My first two I bought new. Since then I've found good deals on used bikes, which go for as little as a third of their new price in close to new condition. I always check BikeRegister and other databases for the frames, but most bikes are never registered, and I'm sure at least some of the bikes I've bought used have been stolen.
I stopped a homeless guy stealing a bike once – he had it flipped and was using it as a lever to twist the D-lock open. (This is why you sometimes see locked bikes upside down.) But I stopped reporting my own stolen bikes to the police after a while; it didn't seem to make a difference. I suspect a small number of thieves are responsible for most of the thefts, and sting operations could catch and deter them quite easily. I've daydreamed about doing this myself. (At Highbury Corner a decent D-locked bike will not survive a night.) Or a mandatory registration scheme could cut into the market for reselling stolen bikes. For now the police don't seem much bothered.
And the tragic truth is that most advance is driven by military tech (as in the case of exploding pagers), so until bikes become an indispensable piece of military hardware we won't see much in terms of developments in security.
Where I live in Spain, thieves once wrenched a lamppost out of the road to steal my €50 bike. It was during siesta so it must have been quite a sweaty job.