Potholes and Pavements: A Bumpy Ride on Britain’s National Cycle Network

Laura Laker's book "Two Wheels Good" is a journey around the UK's National Cycle Network, exploring its history, potential, and challenges. She meets with high-profile cycling companions and discovers beauty, friendship, and adventure along the way. The book highlights the importance of cycling for climate, health, and wellbeing, and calls for better infrastructure and financing to make it a reality.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 304 pages
Publication date: 09 May 2024
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC

Two wheels are good, and Laura Laker is 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 With a passion for both cycling and words, there are few more qualified to paint a picture of the NCN's potential than Laura Laker.

Chris Boardman 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 traveling 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.

Weight: 382g
Dimension: 230 x 150 x 25 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781399406468