Street drama in Whitechapel

Far from expressing concern for the injured cyclist he had knocked off his bike, the sports car driver raged abuse at the crowd providing a temporary barrier against the lunchtime traffic, while his victim lay there bleeding in the road (5th July). Fortunately, not another ghost bike, but another statistic to add to the annual total of over 3,000 cyclists killed or seriously injured on London streets.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/davehillblog/2010/jun/22/transport-for-london-road-safety-statistics-crap-cycling-waltham-forst-blog

Another ghost bike

I've been taking a new route home all winter through De Beauvoir and regularly pass another ghost bike at the junction of Middleton Road with Kingsland Road. It's a memorial to 'Smudge' (Antony Smith) who died there on 21st April 2008.
http://www.ghostbikes.org/

Ghost bikes - a postscript

Driving home earlier this month, I passed a knot of people standing around the Clissold Park 'ghost bike', which regularly has flowers fixed to the railings. Family and friends had gathered to mark the tenth anniversary of the death. The victim was sixteen-year old Thomas Love, killed by a joyrider with five passengers in a stolen car travelling up Green Lanes at over 70 mph. May 1999. The coincidence of place and time struck home. At least one of the passengers in the car had also been killed, I realised. May 1999 was just months before I left a part-time post teaching excluded teenagers with 'educational and behavioural difficulties' in Islington. One of the passengers must have been SD, a troubled youth who I'd worked closely with for several terms, with a disturbed family background and a habit of running away from home into even the greater dangers of a local paedophile network. He'd been accommodated out of the borough for a couple of years and I'd lost track of him until one morning in 1999 I overheard the other kids describing a fatal accident involving a stolen car on Green Lanes and heard SD's name. I'd seen the mangled railings without realising the connection. I'd seen flowers from the victim's grieving mother, brother and friends twice a year without realising either. A dark story and at least two tragedies.

Ghost bikes

For about a year now I've been noticing a growing number of white bicycles chained near bus stops or at busy road junctions around London, but only recently discovered their origin. They mark sites where cyclists have been killed and are both memorials to individual deaths and warnings to motorists to take more care. In the UK the project is the work of a road safety campaigner Steve Allen, whose friend was killed by a drunk driver while cycling in North London. The bike I photographed is at the junction of Kingsland High Road and Whiston Road in Hackney.

There's also a vandalised child's bike chained to the railings of Clissold Park at a bus stop on Green Lanes that's a regular accident blackspot with joyriders.