Cycling in the tracks of Britain’s camping pioneers

Skylarks trilled as I pedalled between pink and white hawthorn blossoms on the outskirts of Oxford, following National Cycle Route 57 on an e-bike picked up in Jericho. I was celebrating the Camping and Caravanning Club’s 125th year with a 60-mile cycling and camping trip, leaving the city where the organisation began and heading to Walton-on-Thames to stay at one of the network’s oldest sites.

The club began as the Association of Cycle Campers after Thomas Hiram Holding and his friend Rev EC Pitt-Johnson decided in 1901 there was enough interest to form an organisation; they elected each other president and secretary. Holding rode a safety cycle and devised early lightweight tents, folding poles and cycle touring bags; his book Cycle and Camp, published in 1897, records that after helping friends attach kit to a tandem they concluded there was something in it.

Jo Cartwright, archivist at the CCC, says Holding would have embraced any new form of transport.

United Kingdom, Oxford, Walton-on-Thames

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