This resonates deeply with what I’ve watched happen in cycling over the past few decades.
We used to have a much richer club culture in Britain. Clubs were genuinely intergenerational spaces, where younger riders learned from older ones, where knowledge, stories, routes, and mechanical skills were passed along socially. Local bike shops were part of that ecosystem too. The humble sale of tubes, cables, pumps, and repairs helped sustain places that acted as community hubs as much as businesses.
But as cycling became more consumerist, a lot of that began to disappear. The easy sales were extracted by Amazon and online retail, while the social labour remained. Independent shops were left carrying the burden of community with far less financial stability to support it.
What’s left too often feels transactional. In some corners of cycling culture, belonging has been replaced by consumption and display. The bicycle becomes a lifestyle product rather than a shared social object.
That’s partly why getting involved with Pedallers Arms bike kitchen has felt so important to me. It reminded me that another culture still exists beneath all this. People helping each other repair bikes, sharing tools and knowledge, teaching without expecting profit from every interaction. It feels closer to an older civic culture, one built on participation rather than extraction.
I think you’re absolutely right that the answer lies in rebuilding the commons at a human scale: workshops, repair cafés, clubs, allotments, choirs, evening classes, reading groups, anywhere people gather regularly to do things together rather than simply consume side by side.
As a framebuilder, I’ve come to believe craft matters partly because it teaches this kind of social relationship. A workshop is never just about objects. It’s about attention, trust, apprenticeship, conversation, and mutual dependence. Those things don’t scale well, but they are exactly what make life feel meaningful.
The bicycle world once understood that instinctively. I think we need to rediscover it.
This is a fantastic note Paul - thank you for it - we need to build out these communities - learning how to do something - garden, cook, paint, write, sew fix things etc is a kind of preparedness for life that I think we need more than ever before …. And I love the word workshop because it can contain so many more things than just ceative writing and it speaks to making & doing in exactly the way you describe here.
I was just sitting in my regular little indie coffee shop reading the para about Henry Shukman (& WHAT a book!) when the playlist started playing Cat Stevens, Wild World. I know it’s about something different, but it suddenly felt so resonant.
And yes: knitting group. This is Kent, remember - it’s not a Stoke Newington knitting group! - I’m learning a *LOT* about how sheltered (constrained, limited, conventional, anti-intellectual, ruled by the patriarchy) so many people’s lives have been! But I won’t miss a week unless I really have to.
Congratulations on your publication day, I'm looking forward to reading your book. "So here is the point: where, in your life, do you reliably gather with other people who are not your family, in pursuit of something you are doing together, on a regular schedule?"
Indeed. For me (newly) I go to the cathedral on Sundays and it's a grounding lynchpin to my week. And I offer a monthly Saturday group to psychotherapists, we are the same small group of eight gathering to think about our vocation and lives and be together. It's the same group for a year so we bond and connect over time. Each Saturday we have a poem or two, reflect on theory and practice, talk shop, eat cake and generally check in about what's going on. It's magical; depth of connection and learning happens during the year way beyond what I have been able to put words to in my reply. Luckily, I think you have put the words to it in your article here! I love it.
I so agree with you. Tens of thousands of other rooms are waiting to be made, it's not too difficult, and it's transformative and supportive and desperately needed. I think for some it seems like just another commitment, something that is too hard to do, too much within a busy life. And so I hope people are inspired by your book to think of a group or a room as the best kind of commitment which nourishes and energises.
Great piece. Writing groups are definitely where I do most of my connecting these days. Saw Marina at Compton Verney late last year (on fab sanctuary exhibition), looking forward to your online session tomorrow.
Really enjoying the book - although reading through my fingers sometimes at the poignant ways that people in the workshops reveal contradictory parts of themselves in the ways their stories do and don’t work. Extremely helpful and great fun, many thanks.
This resonates deeply with what I’ve watched happen in cycling over the past few decades.
We used to have a much richer club culture in Britain. Clubs were genuinely intergenerational spaces, where younger riders learned from older ones, where knowledge, stories, routes, and mechanical skills were passed along socially. Local bike shops were part of that ecosystem too. The humble sale of tubes, cables, pumps, and repairs helped sustain places that acted as community hubs as much as businesses.
But as cycling became more consumerist, a lot of that began to disappear. The easy sales were extracted by Amazon and online retail, while the social labour remained. Independent shops were left carrying the burden of community with far less financial stability to support it.
What’s left too often feels transactional. In some corners of cycling culture, belonging has been replaced by consumption and display. The bicycle becomes a lifestyle product rather than a shared social object.
That’s partly why getting involved with Pedallers Arms bike kitchen has felt so important to me. It reminded me that another culture still exists beneath all this. People helping each other repair bikes, sharing tools and knowledge, teaching without expecting profit from every interaction. It feels closer to an older civic culture, one built on participation rather than extraction.
I think you’re absolutely right that the answer lies in rebuilding the commons at a human scale: workshops, repair cafés, clubs, allotments, choirs, evening classes, reading groups, anywhere people gather regularly to do things together rather than simply consume side by side.
As a framebuilder, I’ve come to believe craft matters partly because it teaches this kind of social relationship. A workshop is never just about objects. It’s about attention, trust, apprenticeship, conversation, and mutual dependence. Those things don’t scale well, but they are exactly what make life feel meaningful.
The bicycle world once understood that instinctively. I think we need to rediscover it.
This is a fantastic note Paul - thank you for it - we need to build out these communities - learning how to do something - garden, cook, paint, write, sew fix things etc is a kind of preparedness for life that I think we need more than ever before …. And I love the word workshop because it can contain so many more things than just ceative writing and it speaks to making & doing in exactly the way you describe here.
I was just sitting in my regular little indie coffee shop reading the para about Henry Shukman (& WHAT a book!) when the playlist started playing Cat Stevens, Wild World. I know it’s about something different, but it suddenly felt so resonant.
And yes: knitting group. This is Kent, remember - it’s not a Stoke Newington knitting group! - I’m learning a *LOT* about how sheltered (constrained, limited, conventional, anti-intellectual, ruled by the patriarchy) so many people’s lives have been! But I won’t miss a week unless I really have to.
Knitting groups! Yay!
Congratulations on your publication day, I'm looking forward to reading your book. "So here is the point: where, in your life, do you reliably gather with other people who are not your family, in pursuit of something you are doing together, on a regular schedule?"
Indeed. For me (newly) I go to the cathedral on Sundays and it's a grounding lynchpin to my week. And I offer a monthly Saturday group to psychotherapists, we are the same small group of eight gathering to think about our vocation and lives and be together. It's the same group for a year so we bond and connect over time. Each Saturday we have a poem or two, reflect on theory and practice, talk shop, eat cake and generally check in about what's going on. It's magical; depth of connection and learning happens during the year way beyond what I have been able to put words to in my reply. Luckily, I think you have put the words to it in your article here! I love it.
I so agree with you. Tens of thousands of other rooms are waiting to be made, it's not too difficult, and it's transformative and supportive and desperately needed. I think for some it seems like just another commitment, something that is too hard to do, too much within a busy life. And so I hope people are inspired by your book to think of a group or a room as the best kind of commitment which nourishes and energises.
Great piece. Writing groups are definitely where I do most of my connecting these days. Saw Marina at Compton Verney late last year (on fab sanctuary exhibition), looking forward to your online session tomorrow.
Really enjoying the book - although reading through my fingers sometimes at the poignant ways that people in the workshops reveal contradictory parts of themselves in the ways their stories do and don’t work. Extremely helpful and great fun, many thanks.