The first ride of 2026 saw about 250 riders brave the wet and cold. It was still raining at 19:30 when the ride left the southbank but it had eased off a bit, and the sound system riders had tarps and plastic sheetings to cover their rigs. A bit of music always lifts the spirits when the weather is shit.
The ride went to Brixton first, to a brand new cycle workshop run by UPCYCLE London. Upcycle had invited CM to come to their new space for some free hot chocolate. upCYCLE is an organisation established by Philip Dobson in June 2020. Inspired by the global Black Lives Matter movement, he felt the need to help young ethnically diverse people in London.
As a person of colour, he was devastated to see the inordinate impact that Covid-19 was having on London’s ethnically diverse community, with young people forced to use public transport, which increases the risk of infection and passing it on to high risk or elderly family members.
He started off simply fixing bikes that were destined for landfill and donating them to charities in London, but after discussions with charities and community leaders he realised that much more was needed to get young people involved in cycling and, more importantly, actually keep them interested.
That’s why he started running Bike Maintenance and Cycle Skills courses at The Remakery in Brixton, where young people can get a refurbished bike for free and learn how to maintain it. Their mission is to address the lack of diversity in London’s cycling community by creating a fun and inclusive environment for young people from ethnic minority groups to share their passion for cycling.
After refuelling with hot chocolate, the ride then headed east towards Peckham / Camberwell, where an electric scooter rider had been killed recently. The rider was also a regular cyclist. The ride stopped briefly by the flowers and candles on Southampton Way before being moved on by the police.
Afterwards the ride went back to the southbank via Elephant and people chatted for a while before dispersing.
Heavy rain the day before and forecast for the last Friday of the month threatened to dampen spirits and numbers, but the weather mercifully held off all day, and this meant that a large crowd gathered on the southbank for the August ride. Estimates as the ride was visible and stopped in a single bloc on the long straight road out towards Stockwell were around a thousand riders, possibly more.
The ride headed off and turned westwards on Belvedere Road towards York Road, avoiding the IMAX roundabout. Some riders were interested to visit Springfield Park in Tooting, a new public park which had opened up to the public only in July. The ride went south west, through Clapham High Street and down towards the southern tip of the Common. At this point, the heavens opened up, briefly but heavily, causing the people at the front to change their minds and turn around. The ride forked right, with the intention of going back towards the river, but ended up still going west, ending up at Wandsworth Common, and then eventually looping back over the north side of the Common.
At the junction with Clapham Park Road, a small group of approximately 50 riders moving faster turned right towards Brixton. As they were not corking the junctions and not waiting for the remainder of the ride behind, they ended up being separated from the main body of the ride, as the riders behind did not see where they had gone. The main group headed north along Clapham High Street, where they stopped and waited at Stockwell Station, for the faster group to join back up. Some riders in the splinter group had turned on their location tracking in the Telegram group, so this made it easier to spot and hold up for them as they arrived. This shows the importance of slowing down and corking junctions if you are at the front of the ride. If you don’t do it, you might get splintered off if the main body of the ride goes another way.
At Oval station, after some celebratory cheering in response to a huge truck horn, the ride turned right towards Vauxhall bridge. Again, some of the front riders charged ahead, without corking roads for those behind, which led to three cars and a bus being in the middle of the ride, before the ride could turn into the Vauxhall gyratory. This led to some tension between riders, with disagreements over letting cars through. But “filtering” between traffic causes bottlenecks and slows the ride down, as Mass needs to be viewed as a large wide vehicle rather than the way an individual cyclist would ride. One rider pulled a phone out and started filming another during a disagreement, which is not acceptable behaviour on a CM ride, and the rider was rightly chastised for this.
The cars and bus were eventually let through, and peace and calm returned. Unusually there was no midway “pit stop” on this ride, probably due to the weather being a bit unpredictable and people wanted to keep moving when the ride was around Clapham. At Vauxhall Bridge, most people assumed that the ride was heading back towards Southbank, but instead the ride headed north across the river, and up towards Marble Arch via Victoria and Hyde Park Corner. For the past few years the ride has generally avoided the west end, for several reasons (too many roads to cork, too much filtering through traffic, and problems with phone thieves using the ride as cover to steal smartphones from pedestrians). However this ride showed how far CM has improved over the last 18 months, as the ride stayed together cohesively, and headed east along Oxford Street in a bloc, with only happy vibes from riders and observers.
The ride then headed south on Charing Cross Road, pausing briefly at Cambridge Circus to the bemusement of tourists and theatre goers, again staying together and not filtering through traffic. At this point the ride had been going for 3 hours and more people had splintered off to go home. At the eastern end of the Strand, some riders wanted to stop at the new-ish pedestrian plaza in front of Somerset House, but four police bike riders were parked there, watching the ride approach. So the ride crossed south over Waterloo Bridge, and ended up back at the start point at around 22:45. One of the sound system riders plugged in a mobile decks unit into his rig, and people stayed under the arch of the bridge dancing until well after midnight, when the batteries on the ran out and the music stopped.
All in all it was a great ride. There was no “wider issue” like a white bike being installed for a killed cyclist, but the atmosphere was overwhelmingly positive, the ride stayed together apart from one splinter at Clapham, which eventually recombined, the west end trip was without any friction with drivers or pedestrians, and there was a decent amount of people still there at the end after 3 hours, which shows that many people are willing to treat it as their “Friday night out”. Roll on the next one!
A thousand or so riders assembled on the southbank and spontaneously rode out to North Greenwich, and went through the newly constrructed Silvertown Tunnel, which is prohibited to cycle through.
The ride then made its way back to Potters Fields, stopping briefly on Tower Bridge for a bit of a celebratory dance.
This report is short as there is extensive coverage elsewhere online of what happened.
If you have never been to CM before, come to the ride on Saturday 17th May before the Reclaim The Streets 30th anniversary reunion. Meet at midday at the Southbank.
This evening’s ride commemorated the tenth anniversary of when CM London visited the Caledonian Road in 2015, where 15 year old Alan Cartwright was murdered in a knife attack by a bike thief. Two other cycling groups, The Fixed Pirates Crew, and Bikestormz, also joined in with the ride this evening, as a statement against knife crime.
About 600 riders set off and first visited the Caledonian Road, heading towards the City and then north from the Old Street roundabout. At the Cally pool where Alan Cartwright was killed, riders erected a banner and lit distress smoke flares. The banner said “Bikes Up, Knives Down / Bikestormz, Fixed Pirates, Critical Mass / United Against Knife Crime”. Alan’s family was not in attendance due to a quiet family gathering but sent their immense gratitude to riders coming back after to long to remember Alan’s awful death. The ride stopped for about twenty minutes and then moved on. Detectives from the Met Police were in attendance but kept their distance away from the banner and memorial.
The second stop for the ride was on Tufnell Park Road, outside the home of Mohamed Abdi Noor, aka Blanco, who had been murdered in a knife attack near the junction of Holloway Road. Blanco was an active member of the Pirates and had been on several CM rides before his murder. He was only 21. At this stop, friends of Blanco spoke on the microphone and talked about what a fantastic person he was. Three members of his family then spoke, talking about their anguish from what had happened, their voices breaking as they talked. They were overwhelmed with emotion, as the riders three-cheered for Blanco and then made as much noise as possible with their bells and horns and voices.
The third stop was at the south east corner of the outer circle of Regents Park, having ridden along the eastern side of the park. This was in response to recent morning incidents with cyclists in the park, where thieves on motorbikes had been using hammers and knives to threaten riders for their bikes. The ride stopped for about fifteen or twenty minutes here, and then moved on.
The ride headed back south, down towards Holborn, and then east via St Pauls, then London Bridge, and finished in the small park opposite Hop Kingdom, where the Fixed Pirates were having a raffle prize draw as a fundraiser for one of their riders Laura, who has been diagnosed with terminal cancer. The pirates there raised the banner above their heads to more cheers from the crowd as the tickets were drawn. The police came to ask for the noise to be dropped down, and then left shortly afterwards.
A larger than usual crowd for a January ride assembled on the Southbank, on a dry evening but with the ground underfoot still damp from rain earlier in the day. Many of the initial attendees were on Lime or Santander hire bikes in groups of 3 or 4, possibly as “new year’s resolution” riders to come and see CM for the first time. A popular video circulating on a social media platform documenting the various rides of 2024 may also have been a factor in getting new people along.
In mid-January a 22 year old man was killed in Stratford on a busy section of the High Street, near the Waterworks River bridge. Leaflets were handed out at the start of the ride asking people if they would consider travelling to this location, to install a white bike as a tribute to the unnamed fallen rider. The other side of the leaflet warned attendees to be aware of the potential of phone thieves in balaclavas infiltrating the ride. Thankfully they were not present again this month.
The ride headed south first, avoiding the traffic in the west end, towards the Bricklayers Arms and then north across Tower Bridge to travel east through Whitechapel. Despite this being a long straight drag out to Stratford, the ride stayed reasonably well together, and stopped intermittently to let others behind catch up. By the time the ride had arrived in Stepney, almost all of the casual / first time rider groups had individually peeled off and headed back to central London. Whitechapel High Street is unappealing to cycle on with friends, and casual riders would likely not have wanted to travel all the way to zone 3.
The ride went up and over the Bow roundabout flyover, and after a bit of confusion with some riders stopping at the greenway path, the ride ended up at the junction where the young rider had been killed two weeks previously. A locked bike acquired by CM participants was sprayed white, with red smoke distress beacons lit up. People living in flats and the guests in the adjacent Holiday Inn looked on from their windows and applauded as the riders chanted “Whose streets? Our streets!” and rang their bicycle bells and hornits.
After about fifteen minutes at the junction, backing up the traffic, the ride then headed north on Carpenter’s Road, travelling through the Olympic area and then into Hackney Wick, then travelling back towards Potters Fields (where the ride ended) via Mare Street, Bethnal Green Road, Shoreditch, and then across London Bridge. The rest of the ride passed without incident. The number of riders with large backpack mounted speakers has increased, likely after the post-Christmas sales, so the ride is rarely without loud music any more.
It had been raining constantly for the two days in advance of today’s ride, but thankfully, by midday on Friday, the rain had stopped and the streets had begun to dry up. A smaller-than-usual crowd of between 500 and 600 riders gathered on the south bank. A BMX trick and stunt rider entertained the gathering crowd underneath Waterloo Bridge, dressed as a jester with spirals and paint on his BMX.
The ride left south bank at 7:30pm and headed south towards Elephant and Castle roundabouts, stopping at traffic lights and waiting for the rear to catch up, keeping the bloc of riders fairly consistent, The ride then headed out south, passing by Kennington Park, again stopping and waiting quite well at large junctions for people behind to catch up and move off as a block again. There was also a nice diversity on the ride, including some families with children, recumbents, and a handcrank-driven wheelchair.
Leaflets were handed out at the start of the evening, asking people to stay together and not to filter through traffic lights. As the nights draw in and it gets darker, in the past the ride has also been infiltrated by phone thieves. The other side of the leaflet warned people about their potential presence on the ride again during the winter.
The ride then took the eastern fork at Kennington and headed down towards Brixton. The ride went as far south as St Matthews Church, and then young wheelie riders looped back around the triangular junction the way the ride came, straight into traffic, filtering between cars. This filtering continued pretty much all the way back up towards the Kennington Junction, where eventually the ride stopped and waited for everyone to recombine.
The ride drifted back towards central London via Little Portugal, stopping again occasionally where the BMX trick rider entertained the waiting crowds. The younger wheelie riders charged on ahead near Lambeth North station, but the remainder of the ride stopped and waited for everyone to catch up, and the fast riders were gone from the ride. The bloc then headed across Westminster Bridge and along the embankment, finishing unusually at St Paul’s Cathedral on the steps. where people socialised for longer than usual.
The ride left the Southbank at 7:30pm as it usually does these days, with about 800 riders in attendance. The weather was good and again with the summer months, there were a lot of newer and first-time riders there, including groups of teenagers still off school. Unusually, the ride turned right coming out of “Theatre Avenue” and did not head up the slope towards the IMAX roundabout, instead going under Waterloo bridge and south on Belvedere Road, then halting in Chicheley Street to regroup and bunch up before heading out on to the A3200. This was actually better in some ways to start moving the ride off into car traffic than the slope and the IMAX roundabout, which is a narrow road and strings out the Mass as it only gets started. There were no City Of London Police in attendance for this ride, compared to the previous two months. There were also no phone thieves trying to inflitrate the ride.
The ride headed in a large bloc through the Vauxhall gyratory, whooping and cheering coming out of the rail tunnel and travelling down Nine Elms Lane towards the old Battersea Power Station. This is a long straight stretch, and as the road opened up ahead, a group of younger riders accelerated off the front of the ride. As the road narrowed past the south western corner of Battersea Park, these riders squeezed between the stopped cars ahead, with others following them. This meant the ride got separated into multiple sections, with car traffic in amongst the ride.
After about 1.5km of this “filtering”, some older riders were able to stop the ride, and allow it to recombine into a single group again, before heading down towards the Wandsworth roundabout. For the remainder of the ride, there was no more filtering through stopped traffic, corking of large junctions was effective, and the ride regularly paused at major intersections to allow the riders behind to catch up with the front, so the Mass moved off safely together without allowing people to drop off the back.
The ride continued to head south west but then turned up towards Putney, and crossed the river at Putney Bridge into Fulham. The riders then piled en masse into Eel Brook Common for its customary midway stop for about half an hour. The “Goldfinger Soundsystem” bike was in attendance on the ride and some riders were dancing in the common as the DJs took turns to play some tracks. This affluent part of the city would be unaccustomed to Critical Mass visiting, and residents nearby came out to their doors making phone calls, with one walking through the stopped riders. The Police arrived very shortly afterwards in a van and a car, but then left again without any sort of contact.
The ride then headed back towards central, avoiding Kensington and Chelsea, travelling back in along the embankment, and turning back towards south across Chelsea Bridge when roadworks impeded sensible progress for the ride. The ride then retraced its steps heading northbound in through Battersea, finishing up at the steps of Potters Fields next to Tower Bridge.
The ride left Southbank at 7:30 as it usually does these days. Between seven and eight hundred riders assembled, with many friends and colleagues of Matheus Piovesan in attendance, who had been killed at the start of the month in Shadwell. A report from the Evading Standards summarised this part of the ride:
“Friends of Mr Piovesan and cycling activists from Critical Mass London unveiled the ghost bike – an old bike spray-painted white – on Friday evening near the location he was hit. An estimated 800 people were present at the event, which was part-protest and part celebration of his life. An earlier celebration had been held by his friends in Victoria Park on July 7, the day following his death.
Brazilian friends of Mr Piovesan had contacted Critical Mass riders via social media, and asked for support to mark the passing of their friend. He was from Rio Grande do Sul in Brazil and had been living in London for more than five years. He was a journalist and music producer, with a regular show on Brixton Radio, and also a keen leisure cyclist. He lived with friends in Limehouse and was returning home from central London after working a shift in a brewery at the time of the crash.
The Critical Mass ride headed to Shadwell, where friends and family of Mr Piovesan had gathered. The crowd paused in Cannon Street Road, and occupied the length of the narrow street. Car traffic on this section of the street is usually fast moving, coming off the nearby A1203, but there are no calming measures on the road as it approaches the residential area and the first-generation CS3 “cycle superhighway” on Cable Street.
A bike donated by community bicycle shop Babyldn Bikes was locked to the fence adjacent to where Mr Piovesan had been killed. Cargo bike riders carrying mobile sound systems played his favourite music, as his friends spray painted the bike white and adorned it with colourful glitter. As the “ghost bike” was being spray-painted, nearby residents watching out of their windows applauded. Mr Piovesan’s ex partner addressed the crowd, thanking them for their support, saying that the carnival atmosphere and energy was something Mr Piovesan would have loved.
Many of the friends and family were crying, as smoke flares were lit as a sign of cyclists in distress. They then applauded as the ride moved on after a stop of 20 minutes.”
After this stop in Shadwell, the ride headed north towards Hackney. The ride split in two at the southern end of Mare Street, as a group went to London Fields, but others went on towards the skate park at Mabley Green, where a BMX and Skate jam was happening underneath the flyovers of the A12 adjacent to the Hackney Wick marshes.
After watching the tricks on the ramp for about twenty minutes, the ride then turned back and returned to central London, heading back via Bethnal Green and Shoreditch, before finishing up at the Potters Fields steps next to Tower Bridge.
A crowd of about six or seven hundred gathered on the Southbank to leave at 7:30. The first desination was a return to London Bridge. After the trauamatic events of last month where an 18 year old rider was driven over and dragged across the bridge, his friends supported the Mass returning to the bridge and doing something as a show of solidarity with the rider as he still recovers from his injuries.
The City of London police showed up at the Southbank before the ride began which was unusual – some riders asked why they were there, and they said that they were there to monitor the ride to London Bridge and stop any phone thieves infiltrating the ride. It was unclear whether they were just there this month, as London Bridge is in the jurisdiction of the City; or whether this was going to be an ongoing thing. They remained with the ride until it headed into Westminster, where a Met van seemed to take over from them, tailing the Mass until it reached the old Battersea Power Station later on.
Despite being a bit cooler than the previous days, and overcast during the day, the sun broke through just as the Mass turned into London Bridge from Duke St Hill. The ride stopped on the northbound lane, occupying most of the bridge, and riders lifted their bikes in the air, cheering and ringing bells and horns. After a few minutes on the bridge, the Mass moved off again, this time looping around towards Monument, and heading downhill towards Lower Thames Street. The ride fractured a bit here as some riders went into the cycle lanes, followed by the police, but it joined back up again as people waited on the northern end of Southwark Bridge.
The ride then headed west towards Westminster and into Whitehall. Some cycling activists had created a banner that said “Tory Transport Policies Kill Kids and Cyclists / End Fake Culture Wars” and unfurled this at the gates of Downing Street. At the time of writing it appears that Rishi Sunak will lose the election later this week. Over the last year and a half, he has deliberately amped up a culture war against cyclists and councils attempting to make neighbourhoods cleaner and safer, in an attempt for votes in London suburbs. This has resulted in some councils being emboldened to remove LTNs and other cyclist and pedestrian friendly infratructure. The banner was a way for the cycling advocates to express their frustration with the policies and dangerous language in the media that has become the norm in recent months.
About a quarter or a third of the ride had shot ahead to Trafalgar Square and missed the banner display, but turned around and rejoined the ride as it waited in front of Parliament. The ride then headed out to Battersea area. It was stopped on Nine Elms (unclear why) and then headed in towards the area around the old power station, just as the Met van which had been tailing the ride stopped and the police inside starting walking towards the front. The old power station has been heavily gentrified into apartments and a high end shopping centre. This is another vague semi-public / private space (akin to More London) with security guards patrolling the outdoor area. They were panicky and agitated, and so some lead riders went down the pedestrian path to Battersea Park, and the rest of the Mass followed, stopping at the western end for about 20 minutes at Albert Bridge.
The ride then headed back towards central and ended at Tower Bridge. On the way back in, there was a minor altercation between some teenage riders and some older cyclists, near the northern end of Chelsea Bridge. A petrol motorbike was riding with the teenagers. While electric bikes and scooters are commonplace on many CM rides now across the world, petrol bikes are still a rarity and generally unwelcome with the fumes. The cyclists wanted the motorbike to leave, but the biker was with his friends who did not back down. The confrontation was eventually de-escalated and the ride moved on back towards central London without anyone getting hurt. For most of the evening, the ride stayed together and stopped and waited, so there was still a sizeable crowd on the ride after 10:30pm.
Later on when the ride had finished, out of the heat of the moment on the ride, the motorbike rider (also a teenager) was approached calmly and talked with at Potters Fields. The ride has started to regularly finish there as there is space to sit and talk with each other by the steps at Tower Bridge. Some older riders explained the history of the ride, and its genesis from environmental movements, to the motorbiker. Many teenagers on the ride, who are more from a bikelife/rideout/bikestormz background, are not necessarily conscious of the ethos of CM. Older cyclist activist type of riders who might have come before Covid have left London or WFH on Fridays and do not attend Mass regularly any more. It is only through talking with teenagers on a human level, and listening to them too, that they can learn about why Mass exists and still continues. The motorbike rider explained that his own bicycle was in need of repair, but he wanted to join his friends on the Friday night, but understood and would come along on his bicycle next time.
