Travel: Cycle the Red route

History and pedal power combine to good effect in the Rebels and Radicals of the East End cycle tour. Simon Calder takes to the tandem

Beneath a sign that proclaims the Royal London Hospital in Bengali, Chinese and Vietnamese, Duncan Hibberd points towards Joseph Stalin's doss-house. Evening traffic moans along the Mile End Road, past the bicycles snuggling up to the railings, while we learn that the dentist's surgery above Stuart's Cameras was the location for a crucial meeting of the Russian Social Democrat Labour Party in 1907. After mapping out the course of the 20th century with Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, Joseph Stalin nipped around the corner to the digs on Fieldgate Street where he was, literally, slumming it.

This event - Duncan's talk, not the founding of the USSR - began the dress rehearsal for one of the most appealing events of National Bike Week: next Tuesday evening's ride, entitled Rebels and Radicals of the East End.

Charlotte Hindle (co-owner and rear-gunner of our tandem) and I were dressed up to the defensive nines in fluorescence. Duncan and his fellow guide from Tower Hamlets Wheelers, Gary Cummins, weren't. "We make a point of not wearing cycling gear like Lycra," said Gary. "We don't think it's a good advertisement for cycling."

The ride, though, most definitely is. It began three years ago as the Wheelers' contribution to the annual celebration of cycling, and has proved to be politically astute. On a two-hour, six-mile pedal around the unchallenging gradients of East London, you discover that the capital's most cosmopolitan quarter was the location for many great social and political advances. And confrontations.

Gary leads us on a half-mile struggle along inadequate cycle lanes blocked by illegally parked cars to St George's, one of the elegant trilogy of East End churches built by Nicholas Hawksmoor. A short-cut through the churchyard provides a verdant interlude. Then you emerge on to Cable Street beneath the potent futurist mural to the barricades built by anti-Fascists against Oswald Mosley's blackshirts in 1936. East London was then, as now, richly multiracial. "Mosley shall not pass", proclaims a banner. "Bar the road to British fascism." And they did.

Onwards, and backwards six centuries. Stepney Green was where East Anglian protesters against the Poll Tax gathered in June, 1381. The Peasants' Revolt ultimately fell victim to treachery, but the rebellion obliged the monarchy to take seriously the will of the people.

Not all the people of the present-day East End seem charmed by cyclists. Motorists seem unwilling to concede an inch of road space to bicycles, and at least one Tower Hamlets citizen awarded us a vigorous one-finger salute. On the roads, at least, anarchy has seized London E2.

Next stop on the circuit is the Ragged School Museum, on the north bank of the Grand Union Canal. Thomas John Barnardo, a member of an exiled Spanish family, had no wish to overturn the Establishment. He came to London in 1866 to train first as a physician, then as a missionary, intending to evangelise in China. But he was appalled by the conditions he found in his own backyard. He began preaching on street corners, "tackling hecklers with authority and dodging slops thrown from upstairs windows", according to Gary's colourful commentary. The Ragged School was originally a canal warehouse, before it became a mission for juveniles where children received food and education.

East London provided refuge for 20th-century radicals, too. On 12 September, 1931, Mahatma Gandhi moved to London, settling at Bow at Kingsley House (really - though he was no relation to the actor Ben, who played the Indian leader in the film of his life). His welcome gifts comprised a goat and a pair of trousers, plus a goldfish bowl donated by AA Milne. A blue plaque celebrates the spiritual sojourn, while bangra music blasts out from what is now a community centre.

Cycling, besides being a fittingly pacifist way to tour the city, allows you to imbibe a great deal of local history in a short tour. Parking and one-way restrictions render a motoring version impractical (at least in theory). Walking would take twice as long, while public transport provides no radical solution to tracking down the haunts of rebels.

One problem: the political heroes are mostly men, so far. The gender imbalance is corrected, at least partially, with a visit to 45 Norman Grove, where Sylvia Pankhurst established a toy factory on principles of humanity rather than profit. But the former Bryant & May match factory is the most striking (sorry) memorial of all to social change. In 1888, thousands of match-girls took part in the first strike by unorganised, unskilled labour. Despite the initial reprisals against the women, the event was an important stage in the development of mass trades unionism.

"Britain's last match factory closed down five years ago," says Gary. The handsome Victorian redbrick factory is now known as Bow Quarter, and the BMWs parked outside show that radicalism has been extinguished in favour of luxury housing. Stalin would hate it.

Gary Cummings, co-ordinator for the Tower Hamlets Wheelers, is on 0171- 265 9095. To take part in the Rebels and Radicals of the East End tour, turn up at the main entrance of the Royal London Hospital (on Mile End Road, opposite Whitechapel Underground) at 7pm next Tuesday, 9 June. And bring a bike.