Birmingham, bicycles, and our cycling past
Birmingham is central to the first global bicycle age, but the city’s enthusiastic embrace of cars later in the twentieth century has overshadowed its involvement. In collaboration with Birmingham Museums Trust – and supported by the AHRC Impact Acceleration Account (IAA) – we are sharing people-centred histories of the city and region’s role in the original cycling revolution.
Looking back to look forward
At the turn of the twentieth century, cycling was on the up. Millions of people were discovering one of the world’s most preeminent technologies, the bicycle, and the radical power of greater personal mobility. The Birmingham-Coventry axis is central to the story of this first global bicycle age, but Birmingham’s enthusiastic embrace of cars has largely overshadowed this history.
Dr Nathan Cardon (Associate Professor in United States History at the University of Birmingham) co-led a research project with Dr Felicity McWilliams (Curator of Science and Industry at Birmingham Museums Trust (BMT)). Birmingham Cycling City: Past, Present, Future is reframing and restoring the city’s relationship with the bicycle.
In June 2024, Nathan spoke of Birmingham’s hidden history as a cycling city at a public talk at The Exchange. He shed new light on the historical connections that informed transport in Birmingham and beyond, outlining the social and mobility politics that influenced cycling in the city and beyond between 1890 and 1990, including the early industry’s link to empire.
Recent local government policy, particularly at local levels, has been clear in its desire to promote cycling and sustainable transport – the former West Midlands mayor spoke of a need for a ‘cycling revolution’ – but little attention has been paid to the social politics that shaped, and continue to influence, the production and adoption of cycling. With the bicycle welcomed as a solution to the linked crises of congestion and climate change, the research project aims to bridge the divide between planners, politicians, and historians, establishing a dialogue where the insights from the past may enlighten future decisions.
Delving into the historical collections
The region’s connection to the history of the bicycle is weak, but it persists. Thinktank, BMT’s science and technology museum, has over 90 historic bicycles in its collection which the research team audited, photographed and catalogued.
In early 2024, research assistant, Dr Jacob Fredrickson, produced a ‘significance survey’ of the historical bicycles (in which each item’s influence on society, culture and technology is judged on a scale) found at Thinktank. Archival work in the Library of Birmingham and at BMT complemented this, exploring people-centred histories of the bicycle in Birmingham. Shifting the focus from the object to the user and how technological objects are often ‘co-created’ has created the opportunity to explore science and technology through the lens of people and culture.
This discovery work, alongside Dr Cardon’s expertise on the global history of cycling and the early bicycle industry, informed a new display on Birmingham’s cycling history at Thinktank. Opening in May 2024, the exhibition – Birmingham: Cycling City – reframes the bicycle around the industrial history of the city, not simply as an object. Two historically significant bicycles are on display for the first time in a quarter century:
- A trade bicycle, produced by the Leonard Gundle Motor Co., around 1950, and used to make deliveries for George Mason and Sons Grocers
- A P37 ‘Manhattan’ men’s bicycle, produced by Phillips in Smethwick in 1957, and used by local cycling enthusiast, Ken Badger, to cycle from London to New Zealand.
Dr Cardon has published on Movements & Mobility, an online forum which looks at the politics of how people, and things, get around, and an object study of a wooden bicycle from Malawi from the BMT collection in the Midlands Arts Papers.
A new lens
How cycling became a global means of transportation, and is woven into people’s lives across the world, has not been widely studied, so this project is both locally and internationally significant. The project has reached over 50,000 museumgoers, alongside community members, policy makers, urban planners, and activists, and presented an opportunity to forge new connections. Nathan’s public talk in June 2024, linked to the exhibit, sparked discussions about how Birmingham can reclaim its status as cycling city, should decision makers wish.
This forum has prompted important discussions, including how sustainability schemes in the present—like cycling infrastructure—can reflect inequalities and how we might address them to make cycling more equitable to all users regardless of race, class, or gender.
Our collaboration with Nathan and the University has demonstrated how the way we talk about the history of technology can powerfully shape the way we think about Birmingham’s past, present and future. The project’s lens – looking at everyday stories of people’s embrace of, or challenge to, technology – serves as a great example for how we can find other new perspectives amongst Birmingham’s world-class science and industry collections.
The success of the project, and in particular the benefits of undertaking the ‘significance survey’ and cataloguing of the collection, has laid the foundation for future collaborations between Dr McWilliams and Dr Cardon. These activities will further examine the people-centred histories of technologies contained at ThinkTank and continue to (re-)shape Birmingham’s connection with its past.