ABSTRACT
This chapter takes the study of UK cycling activism from the policy challenges of the 1960s to the emergence of new political discourses in the 1970s. It commences with a background of the transformation of both transport and urban planning policy direction in the UK under the Conservative administration of the early 1960s. Internationally, however, citizen opposition to increasingly technocratic planning was growing and the chapter shows how cycle activism in Britain began to respond to these alternative ways of envisioning the city and citizenship. A second major strand of concern is that of changing political conceptualisations of the environment. Political environmentalism’s complicated relationship with cycle campaigning (and vice versa) is a theme continued into the next chapter. At this stage, however, focus remains on the flourishing of new forms and discourses of cycle activism before the energy crisis of 1973. Attention is especially given to literature and activity connected with the appropriate technology movement and how its novel depictions of the environmental role of cycling contrast with a very different concern for the environment espoused by the CTC.
