ABSTRACT
To the sociologist or cultural historian, cycling history offers a particularly rewarding research area. It provides one of the earliest and most well documented examples of a modern, technologically demanding consumer good with a reach across age, gender and status. Typically, cycling history pays attention to the 1890s, before stepping swiftly forward into the inter-war period, mass cycling and the rise of the lightweight machine. In this context anonymity truly flourished. Increasingly high numbers crossed with the much more dramatic appearance of motoring ensured that cyclists themselves were unremarkable. Application of the concept of the flaneur does this by moving discourses around cycling out of the traditional modes of cycling history and away from the focus on technological advance. Norcliffe's use of Baudelaire's concept of the flaneur to describe cyclists, while questionable for the period he applies it to in Cycling to Modernity, may not be as culturally problematic as it at first sounds.
