Back Street Heroes October 2024

As I may’ve mentioned on this page once or twice before, as I sit ‘ere at me desk in the BSH Editorial Hovel, I listen to a lot of stuff on the BBC iPlayer, or BBC Sounds as it’s now called, mostly from Radio Four and Radio Four Extra, not really taking a huge amount of notice of it, just letting it wash gently over me, occasionally taking note of some salient fact or witty riposte that I can adapt (or steal) for a BSH article. Hello, by the way, and welcome to this new issue of BSH. I particularly listen to a lot of science stuff (Inside Science, Science in Action, anything with Jim Ukulele… sorry, sorry, Al-Khalili) because, although I was rubbish at science at school all those…

First held in 2013 in railway arches near the Bike Shed HQ in London’s deeply fashionable Shoreditch, it swiftly outgrew that site and moved to the much larger Tobacco Dock in 2014 where it’s been ever since, rising from an original 55 bikes and 3,000 people to a heady 200 bikes and 17,000 people. This year, 2024, it was smaller, it has to be said, with fewer bikes and fewer people than in previous years, but that, it seems, is the way of things this year with most events, as in pay-to-enter events, being down on numbers as, I’m guessing, the cost of living crisis, as the media terms it, having an effect on people’s spending. That said, for such a big event to be down in numbers was, although…

The MT Heads MCC’ve existed in their current form for the last 19 years. They put on various events during the year, but this one is different – officially not a rally, they run the event as invite-only, and the reasons behind it are great ones… although it took me a while to find ‘em out. Y’see, as I sat and had a chat with Julie, Geoff, and Roy from the club, they insisted that, first, I partake in the club tradition of ‘The Drink of Doom’. Now, as anyone who’s tried it knows, there’re two ways this can go: you either sip it and potentially lose the use of your limbs and eyesight for six to ten hours, or you drink it in one and, hopefully, be pleasantly surprised.…

Knocker picked it up in one of his many deals as Lara needed something with a little more ease of use, and reliability, than her Harley, but was still a chop, but, sadly, it was in a lot worse condition than they’d been led to believe – the engine was, effectively, mullered and needed stripping and rebuilding with a host of new parts, and the carbs’d had it, and, in the end, he ended up pulling the whole bike apart and rebuilding it all from scratch. As he says: “It was made up of some lovely parts and looked great, and the guy was using it, but once you started looking a little closer…” He’s not kidding either – there really are some nice components that someone’d obviously spent some…

So, having discarded that idea, we thought about a one-day custom and classic bike show. We already hold our regular meetings at the Cherry Tree in Choppington, which has a very large car park and lots of grass around it, so we asked them if they’d be interested in us putting a show on there. “Absolutely!” was the reply. We spent the next few months, and many meetings, planning the day. The pub already owned marquees that we could use free of charge, and’d even put them up for us, and we booked Miss Mary & The Mr Rights, a five-piece rockabilly band who were excellent and went down a storm. The Christian Bikers offered to come and serve tea and coffee, and Kyndred Spirits MCC kindly said they’d help…

These are the words of Chris Cracknell from (near) Southend in Essex, ladies and gentlemen, and the bike you see here in front of you is that very selfsame BSA, almost exactly the same now in 2024 as it was in 1970. It was brought to my attention by, I think, Chris’ son, perhaps grandson, at the Bike Shed Show at Tobacco Dock in London last year as a genuine survivor of a bygone era of biking – the short period when, following the arrival of Fonda and Hopper’s seminal film on these shores, people customised bikes in a ‘Stateside-style’ rather than actually built choppers out of them. They were nicknamed ‘cowboy’ bikes, and’re probably the rarest of biking style, this being only the second one I’ve seen in… well,…