Sorry if you’ve seen this post before, but i’m having a bit of a reshuffle of the site layout. The books and gear page has gone. From now on any reviews I write will come up in the usual blog feed. 

Thanks for reading.

Nostalgia and a love of the retro is an integral part of the cycling. We hark back to the crushing victories of Merckx or the sacrifices of  a humble domestique and we revel in the sports collective memory. Fantasy images of cycling’s ‘Golden Age’ help to sell jerseys, bikes, even £1700 coffee machines to a hungry audience; A crowd of enthusiasts that foam at the mouth for a week in spring when professional cycling becomes ageless in the mud of Paris-Roubaix. What Tim Hilton’s book does is demonstrate this  collective memory in its British context by telling the stories not only of history’s greatest cyclists, but also the tales of their English contemporaries. We learn about the British men and women that helped to nurture the British cycling scene, the club system, and the great racers of road and ‘path’. This is a must read!