Follow The Money, Tim Dawson (2011) Original article first published in The Sunday Times 30 January 2011

One of my poshest friends called to berate me the other day. He is a minor aristocrat, and the director of a plc. "Its awful", he moaned. "Nearly all my mates seem to want to spend their weekends cycling these days. They go off to do 60 miles or more, and I am left at home, with no one to hang out with, polishing the shotgun and fixing a few bits of fishing tackle."

After 20 years listening to him gloat about grouse bagged, and salmon landed, and always in glamorous-sounding company, my sympathies remained unroused - but my friend has, unwittingly identified a minor revolution that has overtaken cycling.

Twenty years ago, at most cycling events, the accents would be almost universally provincial, and generally indicative of manual trades. Time trials, club runs and cycle rallies were not exclusively the preserve of horny-handed sons of toil, but you never met doctors, lawyers or bankers at such gatherings.

Today, higher professions abound. At the sportif events that are booming at the moment, polished accents and swanky cars are in profusion. Country Life, house magazine of the county set, has taken to publishing approving notices about participants in the 'Tweed run', a cycling event where scratchy apparel is de rigure and deerstalkers take the place of helmets.

And business titans fall over themselves to profess their enthusiasm for two wheels - Lord Sugar owns five Pinarellos, Andy Bond, former CEO of Tesco is a lycra fiend and now sits on the board of a cycle parts retailer and Edward Bonham-Carter, a leading fund manager and brother of Helena, cycles to work in the city.

A recent survey of Boris bikes - the mayor of London's cycle hire scheme - found an overwhelming majority of users were white, male and earned more than £50,000 a year, with 68% aged between 25 and 44.

Not since the 1890s have the wealthy shown such enthusiasm for the cycling. So why have the well-heeled shunned the bicycle for so long?

One clue can be obtained by looking across the Atlantic. Bicycles were almost entirely swept from US consciousness by the rise of the motor car. When interest in pedal-powered transport was reignited there in the early 1970s, it was the better off who led the charge. Join the throng who ride over San Francisco's Golden Gate bridge any Sunday morning for the past 30 years, for example, and you ride with the city's elite.

On this side of the pond, the lingering association of the bicycle with everyman's utility vehicle hung around rather longer. While Californian doctors and dentists were embracing cycling in the 1970s, Britain's factory gates still thronged with pedalling proletarians.

No more. Recent research by Mintel shows that the wealthier you are, the more likely you are to cycle - and that low-income households are among the groups least likely to use a bicycle. Indeed, two-car families are more than twice as likely to own and use bicycles that households with no car.

For cycling in general, the resources and dynamism that well-heeled wheelers have brought with them have been transformational. It would be a shame, though, to lose site of the essentially democratic and universal potential of the bicycle. Perhaps there is now a responsibility on us all to reconvert white van man to the open air and ruddy cheeks to be enjoyed when you swap your steering wheel for handlebars - if only to ensure that we experience slightly quieter roads.

TD January 11

Note: this version differs slightly to that published in The Sunday Times

The illustration is from the CTC's 1897 uniform catalogue, which I found in an uncatalogued scrapbook of Derek Roberts in the National Cycle Archive at Warwick University. As well as the actual fabric samples - see below - it listed tailors in nearly every sizeable town in Britain and Ireland who could run you up a cycling uniform to the CTC-approved pattern.

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