Farewell, knights errant of the road | Henry Jeffreys

This article is taken from the December-January 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.

Last time I was in town, something felt oddly different when I stepped into Clerkenwell Road, but I couldn’t put my finger on what it was. Then I realised what was missing: bicycle couriers.

There were Deliveroo riders galore whizzing about on electric bikes but traditional tattooed road-warrior messengers of the sort that were common in the 1990s and 2000s, I didn’t see a single one. Could one of London’s most distinctive tribes be dying out?

According to Jon Day, author of Cyclogeography: Journeys of a London Bicycle Courier, the short answer is yes. He worked for three years as a courier in the early 2010s and even then the profession was in decline. The problem, as with almost everything, is the internet.

Thanks to ever-increasing bandwidth all those things that had to be couriered like films, photos and legal documents can now be sent online. Covid was the hammer blow with much of central London, where bicycles ruled, deserted in 2020 and 2021.

Bike couriers had their heyday in the 1980s and ’90s. They proliferated as big cities like London and New York became increasingly congested. Often the quickest way around the Square Mile or Soho was by bicycle. In the old days, according to “Buffalo” Bill Chidley who edited the courier fanzine Moving Target, riders could make £500 a week — when you could get a pint for £2.

I caught the tail end of this era when I worked in the PR department of a publisher in the early Noughties. One colleague joked that she spent more time talking to Mike at Go-Betweens than she did with her mother. We’d courier books as well as physical photos to newspapers — far more reliable than using Royal Mail.

They formed a distinct tribe, riding battered Italian racing bikes converted to single fixed gear for ease of maintenance and wore a mishmash of clothing — so different to the MAMIL (middle-aged man in lycra) in his neat Team Sky get-up.

The look was much aped by other urban cyclists. I rode in London in the Noughties and sported a very courier-esque outfit of cycling shorts worn under rolled up jeans with an old knitted Italian racing jersey, cap with a turned-up peak and the all-important shoulder-bag. Such riders were known disparagingly as “fake-essengers” by the pros.

Bike couriers were once part of popular culture. Some even became well known such as Graeme Obree, the “flying Scotsman” who twice broke the world hour record in the Nineties, and American Olympic medal-winner Nelson Vails.

The world of the courier has been fictionalised — from the children’s TV series Streetwise to the sitcom Spaced, which featured an unstable bike courier called Tyres O’Flaherty. You’d see many such riders in real life on track bikes with no front brake and insanely narrow handlebars for slipping between gaps that normal cyclists would not attempt.

The way they weaved through the traffic was breathtaking and a little terrifying

You could always spot veteran couriers by the smoothness of their pedalling style: the way they weaved through the traffic, rarely slowing down, was breathtaking and more than a little terrifying.

Chidley described it as being “so aware of what was around you, you felt like an ant could jump off the pavement 50 metres down the road and you would know about it”.

But he warned against getting complacent. Every couple of years a courier is killed.

There’s also a high suicide rate, though that might be more to do with the kind of people the job attracts — alcoholics, drug addicts, depressives or just loners who struggled with regular office work. The hours are long, the money has barely increased in 20 years and there’s no sick pay.

Attempts to unionise the industry failed, perhaps because of the solitary nature of the riders, though there is a London Courier Emergency Fund for injured messengers.

It’s a young man’s game riding up to 80 miles a day in heavy traffic. The only career progression is to move out of the saddle and become a controller like Buffalo Bill.

Yet despite being economically insecure members of the precariat, couriers had a certain status — the knights errant of the road.

When I worked in central London, couriers would congregate after work at the Duke of York in Clerkenwell Road or Soho Square and drink, smoke and race. Despite all the danger and hardships, on a summer’s day, it looked like a great life.

But like the Cockney dialect, it is disappearing fast. Bill Chidley reckons there could be as few as 50 left, down from around 1,000 in the 1980s. He now works with cargo bikes, but it’s a different world.

They all use GPS now, of course, so they don’t know the city like couriers of old. “Some of the kids coming in don’t even cycle to work,” he said incredulously. It’s just a job too for the Deliveroo drivers ferrying food and drink around town.

It’s “the loss of culture” that saddens Chidley the most: “It was my family.” When the last bicycle courier hangs up his wheels, London’s streets will become a less colourful place.