Bike to the future

Sunday Herald, The, Sep 12, 2001 by Torcuil Crichton

'I knew little of England and set off at random, finding my way from place to place with no plan except to enjoy myself." So wrote the London journalist HV Morton when he set off In Search Of England in 1927. The country he discovered, for the thousands who bought his popular little book, had hardly changed since the Industrial Revolution. It was still possible to meander down country lanes, see horses pull ploughs and smell woodsmoke from the chimneys of thatched cottages in the evenings. The mechanisation of agriculture had barely begun, the cities had not been bombed and rebuilt, and the Empire was still largely intact.

In preparation for a year-long spell working for the Sunday Herald in London, I had decided to explore my new host nation by cycling from Edinburgh to London. The England I was entering, I imagined, was a sprawling, urbanised mass, choked by cars and criss-crossed by motorways. Its countryside would be devastated by foot-and-mouth, its cities riven by racism. It would be unsure of its identity in Europe and its relationship with other parts of Britain.

Only some of these preconceptions proved to be true.

I began at the other end of the map from HV Morton. With no pale blue Austin car in which to putt about, I chose bicycle - and train - in order to travel at a pace that made it possible to absorb the changing landscape.

As I boarded for the Border at Edinburgh's Waverley station I realised that, like most Scots, my mental map of England ran along the railway line to King's Cross. Somewhere, on either side of these iron threads through England, live most of the population of these islands. The 60 millionth Briton was born during my journey yet I knew little about the lives and places these people inhabited. So I set off at random with a cycling guide and a mobile phone to book my bed each evening.

"You do castles very well," I tell the woman at the ruined Dunstanburgh Castle. "They were built to keep you lot out," she replies.

Dunstanburgh is my second coastal castle of the day. There are lots of them on the Northumbrian coast - but not all, I discover, were built as a defence against the Scots. England records a footballing victory in 1966 as the greatest moment in its history but neglects 1066, when the English, such as they were, were trashed by the Normans. The English ruling class was wiped out and the character of the nation altered forever. Maybe that is how imperial ambition began. The Northumbrians rebelled and in devastating reprisals their lands were laid to waste for several generations. The Normans built northern castles and cathedrals, not only to reflect God's glory (and their own) but to remind the English who was in charge.

My day had begun in heavily fortified Berwick-upon-Tweed, where Elizabeth I spent what was then a massive (pounds) 128,000 on defensive measures in an early version of the Star Wars missile defence programme. "Am I in Scotland or England?" I had asked in a sports shop. The assistant gave me a sideways look. "No," he replied. "This is Berwick-upon-Tweed." Given that the town has changed hands 14 times in its history I could understand his reluctance to decide; but the number of St George's crosses compared to saltires in the streets gave England a better claim.

The countryside is all winding lanes, hedgerows and fields of barley. I pedal uphill past places such as Windmill Farm, where the windmill has been replaced by a mobile phone mast, and down again through fields of sheep and bridle-paths full of horses and their detritus. The cycling maps promised traffic-free routes; I did not realise they meant tar-free as well. The faded foot-and-mouth restriction orders, I thought, would be out of date. How wrong I was.

The big local news is that the case against the Northumbrian farmer at the centre of the original outbreak has been postponed until next April, long after all the official inquiries are completed. The only chance for a public examination of the government's role is lost. The airwaves are full of angry farmers.

Late on the second day I arrive in Newcastle upon Tyne. The city is attempting to cast off its industrial image but recession is snapping at its heels. A Sanyo plant has closed in nearby Newton Aycliffe, in Tony Blair's Sedgefield constituency, following on from other big closures. The Northern Echo's response is to call for "real money and real investment in the region". It adds in its editorial that "this means reforming the Barnett formula", which it sees as giving Scotland an unfair proportion of national spending.

As I follow the river out of town a police helicopter hovers above the new Millennium Bridge, which links the trendy Malmaison hotel on the north bank to a new arts centre on the opposite shore. There is a body in the Tyne, a bloated dead figure floating down the river from Jarrow.

I spend an ugly afternoon in Sunderland, where a National Front demonstration necessitates a massive police presence and 25 arrests. There are about 1000 asylum-seekers in the area, a few hundred fewer than voted for the BNP in Sunderland's two constituencies at the general election. Depressed, I skip a train to the Yorkshire moors.