Potholes and Pavements

SHORTLISTED FOR THE VICKI ORVICE AWARD FOR WOMEN'S SPORTS WRITING 2025
'Just wonderful - two wheels good, Laura Laker brilliant. Part travel diary, part love poem to Britain's cycle network ... it's difficult not to be inspired by this fabulous book.' Jeremy Vine
A unique journey around the UK's National Cycle Network and one journalist's quest to investigate the state of our country's cycling.
What if we were less reliant on our cars? What if there were safe cycling paths to take us places instead? What if those paths led to the next town, the next village and the countryside beyond?
This was the dream of a group of Bristolian idealists in the 1970s when they founded Britain's National Cycle Network, which now runs to nearly 13,000 miles across the country. Journalist Laura Laker sets off on an odyssey around the UK to see where the NCN began, and where it is now.
What has gone right - and wrong - with this piece of national infrastructure? Why is it run by a charity whose CEO once admitted 'we've had enough of it being crap, we need to fix it'? Laura lifts the lid on this maddening, patchy, and at times dangerous network, and the similarly precarious politics and financing that make it what it is.
She discovers beauty, friendship and adventure along the way, from the Cairngorms to Cornwall, from the Pennines to the South Wales coast. On her mission to pin down what the NCN is and what it means to those who use it, she also meets up with high-profile travelling companions, including Chris Boardman and Ned Boulting.
In a country where 71% of trips are less than five miles, two thirds of Britons say they want to cycle more and doing so could help our climate, health and wellbeing. Laura is on a mission to see if we can make that dream a reality.

Laura Laker is one of the most respected cycling journalists in the UK, with decades of experience and unparalleled connections across politics and campaign organisations. She co-hosts the Streets Ahead podcast with Adam Tranter and Ned Boulting, is the co-founder of Active Travel Media Awards, and has written for the Guardian, Sunday Times, road.cc, Cyclist, Cycling Plus and many others. She contributes to the Guardian's popular bike blog. @laura_laker

Introduction: Flight
1. Falling out
2. Founding a network
3. Friendship and wayfinding on the Thames Path and Beyond
4. Back to the beginning on the Bristol and Bath Railway Path
5. Maps, a murderer and mud on the Kent and Sussex coasts
6. Millennium miles, moss and an omerta
7. Crime and accidental punishment on the Isle of Wight
8. Cycling across Cornwall with a shrub
9. Camel walk
10. Laker Close, and a reunion of sorts, in Somerset
11. Progress and flipping Boris the bird
12. Chris Boardman, Chester and the 'least shit option'
13. Gung-ho hand-cycling
14. The mystery of the Coalash Triangle
15. Thank goodness for Wales
16. Laker in the Lakes
17. Caledonian people power
18. The dream team
19. Ned Boulting on helmets and a helter-skelter of history
20. This path goes all the way to Liverpool
21. Going full circle
22. They take us because we need to go
Coda
Appendix: The founders of a network
References
Acknowledgements