In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a number of cycling groups in Europe were founded on socialist principles. I had some notion, before reading Jeff Sparrow’s Provocations, of the link between cycling and that era’s feminist politics – the independent, bloomer-clad woman on her bicycle, which Sparrow also sketches – but not of Italy’s Ciclisti Rossi (Red Cyclists) or England’s Clarion Cycling Club. The latter’s anthem celebrated its members’ two-wheeled role in advancing class struggle:

Down to the haunts of the parson and squire
Putting opponents to rout;
Bestriding his steed with a pneumatic tyre.

But the Clarion Cycling Club, founded in 1894, ended its constitutional commitment to socialism in 2021, thus severing itself from a long and, by Sparrow’s account, internationalist tradition of cycling activism on the left – just when the need for widespread, environmentally friendly forms of transport has become acute.