Great rides: Cycling back in time

Cycle touring is all about different places. But I wanted to travel in time, too. In April this year I did the Way of the Roses old style. I rode the 170 scenic, hilly, back-lane miles across northern England, from Morecambe to Bridlington, on a 1978 bike, with kit of the period, doing only what we could do then. 

So: no Lycra; no gadgets; toeclips not cleats; saddlebag not panniers; paper maps not GPS; call boxes not mobiles; cash not cards; a 35mm SLR camera with black-and-white film; asking strangers for local information. Hmm... what about food and drink? Lager rather than cask ale? Could I have avocados or banoffee pie? Here’s how my ride through Britain’s least favourite decade worked out. 

Best of times, worst of times: The 1970s

The 1970s’ reputation is dire. A murky decade of power cuts, strikes, inflation, casual racism and sexism, dull muddy football, smoky pubs that closed in the afternoons, terrible fashion (flares! kipper ties! comb-overs!) and dog poo on pavements (sometimes, strangely, white). 

But for me as a teen, it was also an exciting time, a coming of age: first romance; first disappointment in romance; first job; first sacking; first proper bike. It also saw my first ever bike tour: a weekend from Hull to York via Selby, staying in youth hostels, on my new Raleigh Clubman. It rained, we met a magician, slept on a barge and had great fun. 

Could I recapture some of that excitement today? First I needed to find myself a period bike. I scanned eBay, which mostly yielded rusty shed-finds wanting massive refurbishment. I checked supermarket small ads and saw one-careful-owner old rarities. I browsed bike restorers’ websites, finding meticulously reconstructed 1960s' racers costing my annual earnings, and perhaps destined for a fund manager’s wall. 

But at Resurrection Bikes of Harrogate, which recycles donated bikes for charity, I struck gold. Or rather, silver: a 1978 Claud Butler Jubilee in very good nick, mostly original, for £150. Reynolds 531, Weinmann centrepulls, quick-release hubs, Brooks B17, down tube shifters, large flanges (whatever they are). My test ride brought back vivid memories of Seventies' bikes: taut, springy, narrow handlebars, with the knife-edge gliding momentum of a tall, slender ice skater. 

Not everything was authentic. I was quite happy to have modern puncture-resistant tyres and the triple chainset that had been added at some point. It still had the ‘de luxe’ rack it came with, but to modern eyes it looks as flimsy as a coat hanger. Anyway, I wanted to try saddlebag touring, and Carradice kindly supplied me with a Nelson Camper Longflap, newly made but to the traditional pattern: a capacious Gladstone bag of a thing, strappy and accommodating. 

Cycling friends lent me lights, maps and a cycling cape of the era. Lock? I vaguely remembered having a padlock and chain back then, so replicated the setup from a local hardware shop. 

I was ready to set off, heading for nearly 50 years ago. 

Across the north

The Way of the Roses is lovely – arguably England’s most popular long-distance leisure cycling route. Much of the attraction is the timeless business of quiet roads through thrilling scenery, with a pleasing balance of remoteness, café-stop villages, handsome old towns, honeypot York, and seaside resorts (with train access) at either end. Some people do it in a day; others, like me, take a more leisurely four. 

For such trundlers, dawdling through the hills, classic stopovers are Settle, Ripon and Pocklington, making four consistent days of 40 or so miles. 

In the 1970s, I don’t remember ever booking accommodation; we just started looking out for a B&B about 5pm-ish, wherever we’d got to. We asked at tourist information centres, enquired in a pub or simply turned up at a youth hostel. If necessary we could always phone from a call box. 

This approach would be more challenging today. Tourist information centres are either closed down or volunteer-run and seldom open, call boxes have been repurposed as mini-libraries or defibrillator stations, and everyone snaps up the best and cheapest places to stay on booking.com or Airbnb. So could spontaneity still work? 

Surprisingly, it did – even though I couldn’t use call boxes because the ones still with a phone in only take credit cards, which I didn’t have. At Settle the cheery crew in the bike shop on the market square directed me to a guesthouse. At £80 that was too much for me but they’d also mentioned the youth hostel in Malham. Taking a punt, I rode on the few miles (albeit mostly vertical) to it and found to my delight they had dorm beds for a last-minute £15. Dynamic pricing, you see: last week they would have been £35. 

Youth hostels have changed since the 1970s. Then, you had to stay outside in the rain until you were admitted at 5pm, bring your own sheet sleeping bag, and do a task such as dust the piano. Alcohol was banned and if you arrived by car you had to pretend you hadn’t. Now bedding is supplied, they have car parks, will flog you a bottle of house wine, and you can use the wi-fi all afternoon. And Malham YHA proved a sociable delight, just how I remember in common rooms of yore. A range of folk, old to young, all swapping stories... and nobody staring at a phone. 

At Ripon, where I couldn’t see any B&Bs despite riding around the town-edge roads, I asked in cafés about accommodation. I was directed to the Wetherspoon hotel in the square, which – like the previous night – had invitingly cheap last-minute rooms: £55. A dynamic-pricing bounty again! I celebrated the news with fish and chips plus a Stella. That seemed Seventies enough. 

Pocklington would have been much pricier (I asked in the local library, where staff were very friendly and helpful). However, I’d worked out a fix: the X46 (and some X47) York-to-Hull buses stop here and take bikes. Thanks to the current £2 flat fare scheme and yet more last-minute cheap dorm beds at York YHA (£15 again!), I could have done it cheaply. (As it happens I live in York, so I just got the bus home, then another back next morning.)

Maps not apps

Direction finding proved no issue: the Way of the Roses is well signposted all the way. Except once. At Gressingham, an hour or two from Morecambe, the road was closed, impassably, with no diversion signed. 

The roadworks man, evidently under the impression my bike was an Audi and my wristwatch was an Apple one running Google Maps, advised me to take A-roads to Kirkby Stephen. I consulted my 1970s Bartholomew maps, lent by a friend who insisted these were the cartography of choice then, with a scale ideal for day rides. Unfortunately the scale was too small for the detail of how to cross the river – save for a suggested ferry, clearly now unlikely. 

Curses! But, as I stood looking round bewildered, I was rescued by a local cyclist out for a spin on his self-built gravel bike. Like me, he was the same age as an old person; a super chap, precisely and gently spoken, with a smart sense of humour. I followed him down back roads and farm lanes over a bridge to rejoin the route post-roadworks. We stopped on a bench for a village-shop lunch of pork pie and fizzy pop, chatted and joked, and bird spotted. It was all very 1970s. 

The café stop hasn’t changed, though I suspect coffee is better now and the sandwich choice more imaginative than back then. Such as in Burnsall, a delightful Wharfedale village whose friendly, local, traditional-feeling café overlooks the riverside green. I sat out the rain by browsing the local (Craven Herald & Pioneer, Voice of the Dales since 1853) whose news stories – theft of silverware from a church, cycle club rides, council rows, towpath improvements – seemed enduring, too. 

One thing that has changed in the last half-century, however, is traffic. Levels have doubled since then, and it often feels like the size of vehicle has as well. The vast majority of the Way of the Roses is on little-used back lanes that are still a tranquil pleasure to ride. But several times a monster SUV occupying the width of a singletrack road would come barrelling up at, or past, me, forcing me to ride on the verge. 

Getting to and from either end by train proved easy. Depending on who you talk to, the nationalised British Rail era of the 1970s was either a golden age (simple fares! your bike went in the guard’s van!) or awful (frequent cancellations, lateness, horrible sandwiches). 

Well, I had no problems to Morecambe on the Transpennine and Northern services there. On the first I could buy my ticket in cash on the train, and have my lack of a booked bike space overlooked with a smile. On Northern, which supplied my escape train from Bridlington, bike spaces are all walk-up anyway.

How the bike performed

My five-decades-old bike proved a delight to ride. Not just ‘considering its age’, but simply as a bike. It’s nippy and responsive, pedals smoothly, and is especially fun at speed. As ‘tourers’ were then, it’s basically a racer with minor modifications, designed to go fast. It could zoom down those Yorkshire Dales at 40mph (I guess: no computer, obviously) and stay rock steady and reliable, or skim along the long gentle downslopes of the Yorkshire Wolds at a clip (but no toeclips: they were too small for my shoes). 

Yet because of that racing background, the gears weren’t low enough – which is still a common problem today for tourers. My Claud Butler’s lowest combination is 28/28. My modern Spa Cycles tourer has a much easier 24/36. No wonder the Claud Butler feels 50% harder uphill. 

As for the Carradice saddlebag, well, that was something of a revelation. Its capacity equated to just one of my two mighty Ortlieb panniers, but the Longflap could easily swallow enough tools, clothes, maps, jackets and picnic items for a four-day tour, plus my 1970s SLR camera. There’s a seductive clarity about straps, I found, but the real surprise was how the weight – thanks to being on the seatpost – was unnoticeable. The bike handled differently, more snappily, than my pannier-toting modern tourers. 

And the clothes, well, maybe on 70-mile days in midsummer I’d want the wicking, flexible comfort of Lycra. But on 40-mile ambles in a cool April, the cotton T-shirts, shorts and wool socks and Clarks leather shoes that I wore on this trip – as on my first tours back then – were perfectly comfortable.

It chucked it down at times, and I needed my 1970s rain cape. It was a real museum piece: a kind of yellow oilskin kaftan with a hole for your head that covered everywhere from your hands on the handlebar to your back. It worked pretty well, keeping me mostly dry and warm even in torrential downpours, though it had a habit of pooling water and then discharging it in one go. I’ll stick with my breathable waterproofs but this wasn’t a bad experience at all. 

The lights were a bad experience: 1970s Ever Readys, the front one the size of a house brick and about as good for road illumination. It required two batteries the size of baked bean tins and gobbled them up like a hungry teenager. They didn’t last two hours. The rear one was little better. 

Lessons from history

So what did I learn? That vintage bikes aren’t just lovely to ride, they’re also talking points. Several times a day a head would turn and someone would come and ask about the bike. (“My brother used to do time trials on that”, “I used to have a Claud Butler”, “My grandad had a Carradice saddlebag”, and so on.) That youth hostels, though far fewer than in the 1970s, are still great sociable places if you put your phone away. That last-minute bargain beds can be worth looking out for. 

On the other hand, I won’t be forsaking my modern conveniences of accommodation websites, map apps and digital cameras (one of which I did actually take alongside the old SLR to make sure I had good enough photos for this feature). I learned that my Claud Butler is well worth using for pleasure jaunts and maybe for more tours, and that saddlebag touring would probably work just as well on some of my other bikes. 

But mainly I learned that much of what makes bike touring a pleasure is still there. And I found it on my 1970s-style Way of the Roses. Quiet lanes, country scenery, village cafés, chatting with fellow travellers, the joy of self-contained travel... these things don’t change. Never mind the past; here’s to the future.