We arrange to meet at 10 a.m. at his bike shop, De Ver Cycles. I ride across from Paddington, pleased to take in a short section of Cycleway 7, or ‘The Maurice Burton Way’, which has been informally named in his honour. I’ve never met anyone who has a cycleway named after them before. It is a belated recognition for this extraordinary pioneer of British cycling. I have written stories, biographical stuff, many times, but each has been within the linear scope of my existence. This is different. The opportunity to collaborate is exciting. There are challenges, there is diligence, all of that is to come. A sense of possibility hangs in the heavy London air as I ride south through the ceaseless chatter of the city.
De Ver Cycles is huge, independent, slightly chaotic. A yellow Victorian-fronted block with a grey-brick fascia, three shops wide and surrounded by newbuilds. It is on a busy street, a classic London combination of old and new, with the enormous frontage of De Ver standing incongruously on the main road. We are south of the river. From De Ver, the city sprawls southwards, on and on, rolling down until at some point it gives up, apologetically, and becomes the Surrey countryside. I used to ride this way on Sunday mornings, heading out with the Dulwich Paragon for lazy loops of Biggin Hill and Westerham. South London is the beating heart of metropolitan cycling culture, full of traditional clubs like the De Laune, Addiscombe and Norwood Paragon, alongside historic locations: Herne Hill, Crystal Palace and now De Ver. South London is where Maurice’s dad, Rennal Burton, ended up in 1950, travelling from Jamaica, via Avonmouth and a short stay in Bristol.
The shop is closed on Wednesdays. It is time to catch up, do some admin and ride bikes in the afternoon. His phone is ringing but Maurice ignores it. The late-summer sun is languid. Maurice unlocks the shop so we can go inside and talk. Bike shops are anachronistic, analogue places. They are places for browsing, lifting stuff off shelves, trying things on and not sending them back in a carefully pre-cut plastic envelope. This one has all the tactile warmth of the bike shop, but somehow feels different. On the wall are framed jerseys with the national colours striped across the middle. Magazine covers, articles, press clippings compete for space amid the familiar logos of the bike trade. An archive of material sits in the back office; more magazines, faded and yellowing, next to logbooks marked with ribbons, some with pages open, handwritten notes, a sketch of a flattened oval with distance, time and speed marked out around the edge.
The workshop space is huge, but the tools of the trade are becoming obsolete. The wheel truing stand, state of the art in its day, sits silently on the floor, not called upon anymore because wheels come from the factory and when they wear out, new wheels are bought. This is in keeping with both our disposable habits and the constant imperative of the bike industry to sell you new stuff that is better than the old stuff. Lots of gleaming bikes are crowded into the front of the shop, even though there is a national shortage of bikes. This is because Maurice is canny and he buys his stock far in advance from manufacturers he has known for decades; thirty-five years of contacts come in handy. Gun-metal grey and shark grey, matt grey, these are the current colours, the colours you see on shiny new cars, colours that absorb colour: more matt than matt. A sultry Colnago sulks in the corner and I wish it were mine.
Maurice Burton’s phone rings again. Out the back lurks an additional space, another large shop floor, more storage. We inhabit a corner, perch on a sofa and talk. He hasn’t eaten yet today. This makes me nervous; I know that when I haven’t eaten, I can go from zero to angry in around three seconds. Last night, Maurice was at a book launch in central London, catching up with old friends and rivals over a pint at the pub next door, sharing stories from championships and meetings from long ago. Races were analysed again, forty years later but it feels like yesterday, who beat who, who did the dirty, why the win wasn’t a win, or why it was. Scores can never be settled but they are laughed about, bonded over, for the most part; the glue that joins competitors together, they are no longer racing but the race remains everything, life the metaphor.
Maurice drinks chamomile tea. I am surprised by this. He makes me a chamomile tea. I shuffle my notes, find the questions, set out the recorder. He looks around the room, pauses, sips his tea. His movements are steady, deliberate, possessed by a preternatural calm. He looks across the table, makes eye contact and says, ‘With other people it was constant, a steady thing. With me, everything I’ve had I had to fight for.’
