Census – Hackney has highest number of cyclists

Popular pop-up: Bike Portraits (2011) represented a broad spectrum of people, bicycles and places that together make up ‘normal’ and ‘everyday’ cycling in the borough

Newly released figures from the 2011 Census reveal Hackney residents to be the most enthusiastic cyclists in London, with 14.6% opting to cycle to work.

Trevor Parsons, coordinator of the London Cycle Campaign in Hackney, claimed the figures show it is possible to make cycling second nature. He said: “It’s great to be living in a borough where cycling is a normal thing”.

Parsons maintains that several recent schemes have helped to encourage cyclists, including the re-engineering of junctions to reduce the speed at which cars turn, and converting one-way roads in Shoreditch into two-way streets.

But Mike Kangelos of Push Cycles on Newington Green believes the large cyclist population in Hackney has more to do with the number of creative and artistic people living in the borough, and he claims that cycling in Hackney still “needs to be encouraged further”.

The London Cycle Campaign in Hackney hopes to encourage more residents to use cycling as their main mode of transportation. Buoyed by the census figures, it aims for 22 per cent of the population to use a bicycle to travel to work by 2030, with 15 per cent using a bike as their main mode of transport overall.