Chris Boardman has done it all. Born into a cycling family he became a domestic time trial demon and won an Olympic Gold Medal in 1992. He set world records for the Hour on the track and raced on the continent as a professional, wearing the yellow jersey in the Tour de France. His R&D team helped British Cycling to world domination on the track and he founded Boardman Bikes, now the best selling brand of bikes in Britain. He has thrown himself into campaigning for everyday cycling with...

Jack Thurston heads to mid-Wales to meet Emily Chappell, former London bike messenger turned author turned ultra endurance racer. Plus the social enterprise that's finding a new use for the Royal Mail's unwanted fleet of postal bikes, as Elephant Bikes. Continue reading →

In a recording of a live event held as part of the CycleScreen bicycle film festival at the Watershed Cinema in Bristol, Jack Thurston talks with author Herbie Sykes about his highly acclaimed book The Race Against the Stasi. It’s … Continue reading →

Is bikepacking the most exciting new thing in cycling since the invention of the mountain bike or a much needed rebranding of the venerable pastime of cycle touring? Or is just another cynical ruse to get us to buy more stuff, an attempt to commercialise that wonderful thing called adventure. Jack heads to mid-Wales for the Bear Bones Winter Event to find out, and meets up with Beth Barrington of WildCat Gear to hear about the homespun beginnings of a small company that makes some of the best...

In a live event Jack Thurston talks to double Olympic gold medallist and top Team Sky rider Geraint Thomas about his life in cycling as told in his new book The World of Cycling According to G. Continue reading →

Tim Dawson has the lowdown on a major new exhibition of bicycles at London's Design Museum, including cargo bikes, city bikes and the bikes used by Merckx, Moser and Wiggins to break the Hour Record. He speaks with the shows curator Donna Loveday and consider the show's strengths and weaknesses. Tim and host Jack Thurston then wonder if it's right and proper to fall in love with a bicycle and discuss other great cycle collections in the UK and overseas. Continue reading →

In the first ever rolling bike test on The Bike Show, Jack Thurston takes the Pinnacle Arkose 2 for a spin around the hills above Abergavenny and Blaenavon. The Pinnacle Arkose 2 is an 'adventure road' bike featuring a 1x10 drivechain, hyraulic disc brakes and 40mm tyres. Continue reading →

Bespoked, the UK's Handmade Bicycle Show is Britain's biggest annual showcase for custom bike builders. It's full to the rafters of beautiful bikes but Jack Thurston went in search of the most useful bikes at the show, from an off-road porteur to a separable road bike to a childback tandem in titanium. Continue reading →

It’s the end of the second week of this year’s Tour de France, just time for us – and the riders – to catch our breaths before the final week and the showdown in the Alps. Joining Jack Thurston for … Continue reading →

After eight varied and exciting days of bike racing, the riders in the Tour de France take a well-earned rest day. Cycling journalist and author Edward Pickering has been following the race and is on hand to review the first … Continue reading →

With just a few days until the start of the 2015 Tour de France, cycling author, journalist and photographer Guy Andrews joins Jack Thurston to look forward to one of the most eagerly anticipated grand tours in decades. With four … Continue reading →

Three months and 17,000 miles into his attempt to break the longest-standing record in cycling, Steve Abraham suffered a road crash with a moped, leaving him with two broken bones in his ankle. We hear more from Steve as well as from some of his many well-wishers. Continue reading →

Bike sales are up, cycling is all over newspapers and magazines. We in Britain are in the middle of a bonafide bike boom. So says veteran cycling journalist Carlton Reid, who's writing a book about the bike boom, that's called, imaginatively, "Bike Boom". But fellow long-in-the-tooth cycling journalist John Stevenson of Road.CC disagrees. Cycling in Britain is far from booming, it's flat-lining. The pair lock horns on air, joining host Jack Thurston to debate the bike boom. Continue reading →

With the recent reawakening of interest in the Hour Record, host Jack Thurston is joined by Michael Hutchinson, a professional bike racer who has dominated the UK time trialling scene for more than a decade, setting national records for distances from 10 miles to 100 miles. He's also an accomplished writer and his latest book Faster: The Obsession, Science and Luck Behind the World's Fastest Cyclists documents with forensic detail and wry humour his career-long quest to ride his bicycle very,...

Historians often regard the defining events of the 1930s as the Great Depression and the march towards the second world war. Yet the decade also saw something of a consumer boom, at least among well-to-do inhabiting the suburbs of London and the south east. Historian Dr John Law of the University of Westminster joins Jack Thurston to share his research into the a new suburban lifestyles of the interwar years, including the dramatic increase in private, personal mobility though the use of...

It's the toughest and longest standing record in cycling. Only a handful of people have attempted to break the record Tommy Godwin set in 1939 for the greatest distance ridden on a bike in one year. But this year two extraordinary cyclists are having a crack at it. In an in-depth interview with British long distance legend Steve Abraham, who is already almost six weeks into his record attempt, Jack Thurston finds out what kind of person takes on the challenge of riding an average of 205 miles...

Jack Thurston’s guest this week is self-confessed angry young man, Julian Sayarer, who, five years ago, set a new record for cycling around the world. Having taken a strong dislike to Mark Beaumont, the previous record-holder, whose record attempt was backed by big business and, according to Sayarer, represented everything that was wrong with the world. He wanted to beat Beaumont and take the record back ‘for the people’.  They meet on on the banks of the River Wye a few miles downstream...

Statistics tell us that for the same distance travelled you're more likely to come to physical harm on a bike than on most other modes of transport. But even so, crashes are quite rare. Much more common yet much less studied and understood, are the almost crashes, the near misses, that are so much a part of the experience of cycling in Britain. The Near Miss Project is an academic-led study that seeks to find out more about the experience of near misses. Joining host Jack Thurston to look...

Jack Thurston is joined by a galaxy of stars from the world of cycling literature to pick over the cream of this year's crop of bike books. Nominating their cycling book of the year are Feargal McKay, Ned Boulting, Herbie Sykes, Daniel Friebe, Tom Southam, Richard Moore, Max Leonard and Emma O'Reilly. Guy Andrews, founding editor of Rouleur magazine, is on hand with his crystal ball to look at what cycling books we might expect in 2015 and years to come. Continue reading →

Electric bikes are a rapidly growing area of the bicycle industry, offering the promise of effortless two-wheeled travel. Professor Mark Miodownik of University College London tests a Smart E-bike (pictured, above) as part of an in-depth look at e-bike technologies, … Continue reading →

Jack rides with singer-songwriter and cycle-tourist Jet McDonald, setting out from Bristol on a summer evening, riding along the banks of the River Avon, through the industrial landscape of Avonmouth to the banks of the River Severn and beyond. Continue reading →

The Bike Show and the cycle clothing company Rapha share a birthday, and while The Bike Show keeps on keeping on, Rapha has grown into a global brand and is toasting its success on the Champs-Élysées as suppliers of clothing to the Sky Pro Cycling Team. Jack checks in with Laura Bower and James Fairbank at Rapha to talk about Chris Froome's fishnets and what the company is doing to encourage more women to ride bikes. Summer is festival time and Jack chews over the Rapha Tempest and the Eroica...

Klaus Bondam, Director of the Danish Cyclists Federation and former deputy mayor in charge of cycling in Copenhagen rides with 'Buffalo' Bill Chidley to the Hackney Cycling Conference. En route they try to find out how London's roads compare with cycling cities like Copenhagen. Then Bill joins Kieron Yates and Jack Thurston to discuss what happened at the conference, and where things are with the Mayor of London's much heralded cycling revolution. Continue reading →

Enjoying nature has always been one of the pleasures of cycling. This week we hear from two organisations working to protect and improve Britain's natural places. Andy Byfield of the charity Plantlife explains his charity's new campaign about road verges while Garfield Kennedy of the Woodland Trust, which manages hundreds of woods and forests across the country, explains why mountain-bikers and other cyclists are welcome in their woods. Continue reading →

In the opening week of the Giro d'Italia, or Tour of Italy, Feargal McKay joins Jack Thurston to cast a historian's view over the race, looking into its origins, its rivalry with the Tour de France and where the race is heading in the years to come. Continue reading →