Lancaster Critical Mass: Does It Still Exist? by Dave Horton

Published in Carlsson, Chris (ed.) (2002): Critical Mass: Bicycling's Defiant Celebration, Oakland, California: AK Press.

Lancaster Critical Mass is dead, long live Lancaster Critical Mass!  Critical Mass hit the streets of rush-hour Lancaster on the last Friday of January 1995.  Over the next couple of years it became a regular fixture of the local activist scene; we grew to know and love the Mass as a familiar monthly event.  But as the last one took place over two years ago, surely Lancaster Critical Mass is now dead, surely it no longer exists?

The history of Critical Mass in this relatively remote corner of north west England is an intriguing one.  There had been bike protest here before Critical Mass's 'official' arrival - during Green Transport Week, in May 1994 for example, around eighty people took part in a city centre bike ride which could've been called 'Critical Mass', but wasn't.  Although Masses were by that time already regular monthly occurrences in other parts of Britain, it wasn't until the start of the following year that activists here - having heard and learnt about the rides in Birmingham and London - decided to bring the phenomenon to the streets of Lancaster.  That first ride, in January 1995, saw four brave souls pedal around the city in blizzard conditions.  Things could only look up; and they did.

Every month through 1995 and 1996, Lancaster Critical Mass hit the rush hour traffic of the last Friday afternoon of the month.  Cyclists would meet in Dalton Square, with the statue of Queen Victoria at its centre and the victorian Town Hall rising above, and ride out onto the city's ordinarily congested one-way system.  Some months we had a police motorcycle escort, some months a surveillance helicopter flew overhead, and some months we were left almost completely alone.  Lancaster is a small city, and Critical Mass here never became the kind of large scale protest event it did elsewhere.  But a regular contingent - mostly drawn from the city's alternative networks - always put in an appearance, and good months would see sixty or seventy people turn out.

So what's happening now?  Why, if it was an important and valued part of local activism, did Lancaster Critical Mass stop occurring on a monthly basis?  Because Critical Mass came, during the middle of the 1990s, to be a regular fixture on Lancaster's activist calendar, its disappearance as a monthly event later in the decade is easily regarded as somehow a failure, a visible symptom of an erosion in activist energies and visions.  Yet Critical Mass here has not in fact disappeared; rather, it has metamorphosed into an irregular but very effective tactic which now forms one part of the local alternative movement's mobilisation repertoire. 

There's a whole bundle of reasons contributing to this shift in form of our local Critical Mass.  During the mid-1990s, the regular monthly mass was riding on both the wave of activist indignation over the British Government's road-building frenzy, and high excitement over the widespread and well publicised opposition to it.  The mainstream media fell in love with images of treehouse-dwelling and tunnel-digging roads protestors, and quite suddenly it was even a little bit sexy to be an environmental activist!  Every road building project was being met with fierce and sustained resistance, and Reclaim the Streets events were breaking out up and down the length of the country.  Many Lancaster-based activists had engaged in roads protests elsewhere, and now wanted to express their opposition to car culture more locally.  And we had, actually still have, our own local road scheme to get stuck in to.  The City and County Councils, together with our local Members of Parliament and the Chamber of Commerce, spent most of the 1990s throwing vast amounts of time and money at outlandish proposals for a Lancaster Bypass; the insane social and environmental consequences of this scheme have done more than anything else to animate a whole range of local groups and campaigns, and to turn the car - here as elsewhere - into an intensely politicised object.  For many of us, it is regarded as the principle saboteur of and obstacle to convivial day-to-day life; a powerful symbol of the desecration and desolation of our communities.

That was the mid-1990s, and it felt like it would last forever, that monthly dose of communal warmth, the adrenalin rush of taking our rightful space and slowing down the pace of the city.  But times have changed and key activists have moved on since then.  These days, Lancaster - with a bunch of dynamic, young and eager Green Party City Councillors, and a Green County Councillor - is earning a reputation as a 'green city'.  And just possibly, the institutionalisation of this highly energised group of green activists has increased the cultural gap and reduced the amount of communication between the more 'radical' and more 'reformist' activists within the local area.  We've also just got a Millennium present, a little late but better than never; there's a brand spanking and actually quite brilliant new crossing of the River Lune, the Millennium Bridge, devoted to cyclists and pedestrians.  More widely, the local network of cycle paths is - albeit very gradually - improving and expanding.  There's some sense, then, that - at least in our roles as cyclists - we've won some important gains.  Although plans for a Lancaster Bypass remain an important focus of activist opposition, and will continue to be met with the contempt they deserve, in general roads and cars can feel a bit like 'yesterday's issue'; other concerns - such as oppositon to genetic contamination of our food - have come along, and many activists are increasingly turning their attentions to globalised protest as part of the 'anti-globalisation' movement.

But, in spite of everything, Lancaster Critical Mass is not yet dead.  Instead, it has shifted in form and so retains its relevance to a changing wider context.  As part of the global day of action against corporate capital of June 18^th 1999, for example, a Critical Mass formed an integral part of Lancaster activists mischievous festivities.  Amidst a range of other local actions, and while another contingent of Lancastrians took to creating some timely mayhem in the financial district of London, seventy of us took to our bikes and reminded the people of Lancaster, one more time, that the future really can look different.

In this new guise as an occasional action, Critical Mass is highly effective partly because it has already - in its previous incarnation - entered local folklore.  We are that anarchic bunch of militant cyclists who disrupt the totally legitimate journeys of decent, law-abiding citizens and bring complete chaos to the city centre.  All by ourselves, clever things, we created what has become known locally as 'Black Friday', one beautiful afternoon in 1996 when motorised traffic within the city ground to a complete and utter halt, finally - though not, unfortunately, permanently - paralysed by the sheer weight of its own collective stupidity.  So today, merely the mention of those two fine words - Critical Mass - is enough to generate hysteria among certain sections of the local press, always on the lookout for the most unlikely and overblown reasons to explain Lancaster's traffic problems.

But Lancaster Critical Mass is not, and never has been, solely an attempt to influence transport policy.  On the surface, rides are comprised of cyclists, concerned with and publicising the ascendancy and domination of car culture, and the consequent marginalisation - almost to the point of extermination - of the bicycle on city centre streets.  But in Lancaster it is, in general, a ragtag assortment of social and environmental activists - some of whom have to borrow bicycles - who take part, and the rides have never attracted more than one or two club racing or touring cyclists.  And the local cycle campaign group, Dynamo, have always had an ambivalent and uncomfortable relationship to the Mass.  Some Dynamo activists have been keen and central participants, but others express outright hostility to the 'unreasonable' and confrontational approach implicit within the claiming and taking of space without a formal invitation from the authorities.  From their perspectives, Critical Mass risks alienating those local decision-makers with whom we should be building good, productive working relationships; the Mass is an incomprehensible and confusing collection of strange and unspecifiable 'anarchist types', whose understanding of and sensitivity towards local bicycle politics is naïve or non-existent.

So whilst Critical Mass certainly represents an important intervention into debates surrounding urban transport and the future of our cities, I think its primary importance, at least in Lancaster, lies elsewhere.  Here as everywhere live and work people with roughly compatible but distinctly oppositional political and value positions.  Most of the time, they exist independently of one another, perhaps getting angry at the same news stories, showing support for the same issues and campaigns, whilst unknowingly crossing paths in the local wholefood co-op or sitting at adjoining tables in our green-friendly vegetarian café.  Such individuals share an alternative culture, but - for as long as they remain anonymous to each other - are unable to develop joint projects from their shared ways of life, values and goals.  Critical Mass made - and continues from time to time to make - visible and tangible the connections between them, transforming anonymous inhabitation of an imagined community into meaningful and possibility-laden participation in a realtime face-to-face community.

Critical Mass here has always been an occasion for the coming-together of the city's ordinarily dispersed constituency for social change, a coming-together which creates a highly visible demonstration of an alternative culture and produces those pleasures associated with immersion in good company.  This alternative culture is of course always there, but it ordinarily remains out-of-sight, hidden from public view.  The vast majority of the time, we go from day to day doing what we can to make the world a more socially just, greener place and experimenting with, and trying to forge, new and more appropriate ways of living.  And then, just occasionally, we throw a party, come together and cause a scene.

During the mid-1990s the ordinarily invisible networks of Lancaster's alternative culture mobilised in a demonstration of unity once a month.  These monthly gatherings publicly announced a locally-existing alternative; we demonstrated to our own selves, to each other and to the district more widely that we were a community carrying a different agenda.  Critical Mass gave us the opportunity to parade, indeed flaunt, our (internally actually quite diverse) politics.  It provided an affirmation of ourselves as a political community with demonstrable values and tangible goals.  And today, ten years on from Critical Mass's inception in San Francisco and due to the occasional instigation of a handful of enthusiastic individuals utilising the Internet and activist word-of-mouth and attaching flyers to bikes parked around the city, Critical Mass rides still put in irregular appearances and demonstrate to all the continued existence of a local culture of resistance.

As a regular event, Critical Mass was very powerful in helping to sustain, as well as to extend, a local subterranean movement network reflecting a distinctive if diverse kind of cultural politics.  Critical Mass pulled in lots of different individuals, with quite a range of orientations to the world, and allowed them to participate in a joint project.  Critical Mass provided us with an opportunity to set aside those minor differences which often keep us separate, and to unite instead along our similarities.  And acting together, protesting and having fun, brought us closer together - making us more likely to stop to say 'hello' in the street, go over for a chat when we spotted a now familiar face in the green café.  And, ironically, being lumped together as Critical Mass - one homogeneous crowd of people - by the local press helped to cement this sense of ourselves as a 'we' which outlasted the duration of the Mass.

This still remains the case, albeit in slightly diluted form, today.  The real beauty of Critical Mass, at least as it ordinarily tends to play itself out here in Lancaster, is its continuing ability to bring together a broad bunch of people.  It acts as a real umbrella event, with progressive social and environmental activists of many persuasions joining together for a gentle pedal.  Partly, of course, this is because Critical Mass is a relatively 'low-cost' action - it demands no discernible commitment beyond turning up with your bike intent on having a good time.  And herein lies the undoubted importance of Critical Mass; it is a tool not only for enhancing the activist identities of individuals, but also for building a wider sense of political community.  By bringing together people who might not otherwise and ordinarily meet, it helps to generate a stronger sense of solidarity within local social movement networks.  Of course it's easy to romanticise the past, but back in the days when the Mass was always either just about to happen or had just happened, it felt like I knew more people, I could tell you which people were involved in what kinds of visionary action, and it seemed as though activists in general knew one another better.  It was, put simply, a fantastic community-building mechanism.

Once the boldest move - the greater act of deviancy - of taking back space from cars is accomplished, all manner of smaller acts become thinkable.  Reclaimed space becomes the setting for a festival in which the ordinary rules of interaction are subverted - the blowing of whistles at passers-by replaces the impatient growl of engines; suddenly the separation and safety constructed by the 'windscreen' is gone - face-to-face interaction becomes not only possible, it's unavoidable.  During Critical Mass we pedal out the kinds of lifestyle and society we want, in the present.

These days, now I no longer automatically know what I'll be doing on the last Friday afternoon of the month, Critical Mass feels a bit like a barometer for the more general health and vitality of the local protest scene.  Those of us with the fondest memories of Critical Mass during its regular phase are no doubt much more prone to bouts of nostalgia, when we start ruminating on the need for another Mass to perk things up a bit - get everyone's spirits and energies up again, stimulate some contacts, maybe instigate some fresh projects.  Often, and of course this is also a cop-out, we are also the ones now trying to turn our activist experiences into a means of paying the bills, or struggling hard to be good counter-cultural parents; and we are generally beginning to lose touch with 'the spirit of the times'.

The more inward-looking and subcultural orientation implicit in the community-building function of the Mass is not to say, though, that it doesn't also and always retain a strongly outward-looking orientation.  Rides never fail to engage with and creatively prod the imaginations of appreciative onlookers.  All kinds of flyers have, over the years, been produced and handed out to waiting (most often very patiently - motorists in Lancaster are habituated to, and so remain largely passive in the face of, hold-ups) motorists and passing pedestrians.  And on the whole I think we have always been greeted with an appreciation borne of the recognition that something needs to be done about the congestion and pollution which daily strangles the life from Lancaster city centre.

And the Mass never fails to construct a space, carved out of the ordinarily car-dominated city streets, which has a powerful impact upon all those who experience it.  Despite the whoopees and whistles of the Mass, the street turns amazingly quiet; the sound of the voice is slight compared to the incessant and oppressive grind of motorised traffic.  Quite suddenly, and in a way which has never failed to surprise me, the street becomes a participatory space.  Time is slowed right down, almost like it's standing still, and an alternative set of urban rhythms becomes discernible.  To hear in broad daylight on an ordinarily traffic-choked street the sound of another person laughing, without knowing why, is to experience the desirability of a transformation in urban space.  Critical Mass signals to the rest of Lancaster the presence and possibility of an alternative.  The answer - both to city centre gridlock and to existing unsatisfactory forms of community interaction - can be put into practice, here and now.

Undoubtedly, Critical Mass within Britain forms an important part of a much broader anti-roads movement, which - whilst it continues today - was at its most intensely vibrant during the mid-1990s.  As such, it has contributed to shifting understandings of the place of the car in our cities.  Today, for example, almost noone in Britain would dispute both that the car is a problem, and that the personal freedom to drive where you want, when you want must inevitably come to an end.  But Critical Mass, or something very much like it, still clearly has an important place within the protest cultures of Britain's cities.  In Lancaster, as an occasional rather than regular action, Critical Mass is no longer these days always referred to as Critical Mass.  The various flyers circulating in advance of the ride of June 18^th 1999, for example, mentioned an 'Urban Promenade' and 'The Call-it-what-you-want' ride.  Importantly, though, the idea that lots of people riding around our city centre is an incredibly effective way of taking action is now firmly embedded within the repertoires of a generation of activists.

Wherever it takes place, the Mass announces actually-existing alternatives to 'business-as-usual'.  The priorities and values of subterranean networks, committed to the cultivation of liberatory struggles for social and ecological justice, are paraded and - as in all good parades - succeed in stopping the traffic.  And most importantly, Critical Mass helps to build and nourish those moral and political communities which engage in very many different protests, plans and projects for grassroots social change.

So what are the possible future paths for Lancaster Critical Mass?  I think its capacity to make protest participatory will almost certainly see its continuation as an important strategy in future days of action.  But there are also clear ways in which it could be made, should there be a bicycle entrepreneur so inclined, more populist and large scale.  It's always felt ironic to me that, given Critical Mass is consistent with all kinds of government policy - to do with Local Agenda 21, reducing car dependency, building participation in sustainability and reinvigorating city centres - it has sometimes met with such hostility from the authorities (actually, in Lancaster it feels like we provide the local constabulary with a rare opportunity to test their procedures for dealing with civil disturbances).

With its developing car-free transport infrastructure, the local district is becoming more popular with leisure cyclists.  Such people form a potentially mobilisable base for mass participation bike rides which might inculcate the idea that cycling is a viable means of transport in the next generation, who are currently growing up with the idea that cyclists are an extinct or at least endangered species of road user.  More intense local promotion of 'Car Free Day' and similar events might also see something not unlike an officially sanctioned Critical Mass bringing more people by bike into and around the city centre.  But, in the more immediate future, I have a feeling that Critical Mass will dust itself down and wheel itself out for another dose of bicycle carnival sometime fairly soon.

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