Central London CTC blog

Copenhagen is one of the world’s best cities for cycling. It is ideally engineered for bike riding, with broad bikeways laid alongside almost every road in the city centre. Bike use is a planned, integral part of the transport network, not a retrofit.

It’s the obvious way for the tourist to explore the city and that’s what my wife and I did when we paid a visit to ‘the salty old queen of the sea’. We were able to rent bikes at our city-centre hotel and and got a useful briefing from the desk clerk. In Denmark, a cycle is not legally a vehicle, and obeys different rules. In particular, this means no left turns at traffic lights on main thoroughfares: you must pull off to the right and wait for the lights to change in your favour. You must give way to pedestrians at the many zebra crossings, and also have lights after dark.

These are not idle rules. The police can and do pull cyclists who flout the law, we were told, and levy fixed-penalty fines of 250 kroner on each count. If you are nicked for running a zebra and turning left with no lights, that’s three offences and you face fines totalling 750 kroner. A favourite time for a police crackdown is early November, so that’s going to put a sizable hole in your Christmas-pressie budget.

Bikes are mostly the traditional sit-up-and-beg type favoured by the ‘slow cycling’ movement, though some modern technology is creeping in. Though built in steel, our bikes had alloy wheels with fat 26-inch Schwalbe tyres and rolled very nicely. The built-in nurse’s lock and kickstand are invaluable for parking, but regrettably the back-pedalling rear drum brake persists.

A very wide spectrum of people use bikes, by no means all young. There is a disconcertingly large proportion of comely young blonde women (as enthusiasts of the wildly popular Copenhagen Cycle Chic website will know), many of them with a small blonde child in a rear child-seat or, if the child is larger, in the front load deck of a three-wheel cycle utility.

We were lucky to have a fine cloudless day and were able to complete a widespread tour of this graceful city of boulevards and palaces, spires and statuary. I could not imagine a better way to take in the principal sights, and it is a boon to be able to leave the bike parked with no fear of theft. One gets a strong impression of the power and prestige of the Kingdom of Denmark, whose capital dominates sea access to the Baltic Sea. In this ambition it has long been rivalled by its neighbour Sweden and there is plenty of evidence of Denmark’s past naval and military might.

Militarism has receded in contemporary Denmark and the army has abandoned much of its holdings of buildings and land either side of the defensive moat and 17th-century ramparts to the east of Christianshavn. Squatters moved in and in 1971 proclaimed the ‘Freetown of Christiania’, which continues to this day to defy ‘normalisation’ by the city authorities and remains one of Europe’s last redoubts of hippy culture.

Christiania’s city end is just behind the magnificent baroque Church of St Saviour, with its amazing corkscrew spire, and the free republic spills eastwards to the shores of the 4-km long moat, an idyllic, rural location where long-stay squatters have converted disused buildings into splendid though often ramshackle lakeside homesteads – accessible of course only by bicycle. Pausing for a rest in the busy Christiania market place, we selected some high-grade weed from a splendid display on a stall, and passed an agreeable half-hour spliffing up with some conversible locals at a nearby open-air bar. Only joking!

Copenhagen’s daily traffic flow integrates cycling to a remarkable degree. Practice makes perfect and cyclists are skilful and proficient. Their approach is practical, not sporting, and though we might be tempted to describe their mode as ‘slow cycling’, they make purposeful and indeed swift progress. It was a novel experience to be overtaken elbow-to-elbow by young mums with children in back. I saw a tricycle utility with its outer front wheel cocked in the air as it negotiated a sharp bend. And when I stalled at lights in the town hall square at rush hour, unable to get my right pedal up to the start position because the wretched back-pedalling brake prevents it, the ongoing rush of Viking commuters showed no mercy!