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Bloke On A Trike

I feel bad for missing my schedule earlier this month, but life got int he way, and things have been a tad complicated. But things are still mostly chugging along.

As it became apparent a few months ago, my wife and I left London and moved a little further North, to Milton Keynes. A city that, before moving to England, I only heard mentioned by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman in Good Omens. As it turns out, the choice was in part influenced by having multiple colleagues, including teammates, in the city already, and in part by the fact that the city strikes a balance for one very important aspect: transports.

As you may remember, I still don’t have a driving license. Not entirely for lack of trying: I have passed my theory test now in three countries, including the UK, but I also had limited needs for it. Dublin first, and London second, are cities in which you really don’t want to be driving. And while for Ireland the ability to leave the city is fairly constrained by the access to cars, England and Great Britain have more than decent train and bus connections, so over the seven years I spent in London I have not felt particularly constrained by the lack of a license.

But Milton Keynes is not London. While there is some level of public transport, it is neither as frequent or capillary as London, despite being more expensive. Busses going into and out of the city centre are at least reliable, but if you’re trying to hop between the satellite villages where the majority of the housing is, you’re quite out of luck. The nearest high-street from our house is in a village that is less than 15 minutes drive, but would take over an hour to get there by bus — and two rides, there’s no “Hopper Fare” in Milton Keynes. Which is why I have started a (probably pipe-dream) petition to get a new bus route.

But I did say that there’s a balance to be stricken here, and the answer to that is that Milton Keynes has a terrific, if a bit ran down and in need of further investment, network of pedestrian and cycle roads called Redways. Do not confuse them for the “cycle superhighways” that London has been building into the existing road network over the past ten years or so: these roads are significantly larger, and (for the official part at least) do not cross motor traffic at level at all, going either below or over it.

While not all of the satellite villages are connected directly with the “official” Redways, at the very least the new built areas tend to provide comparable cycle and pedestrian spaces to the side of their main roads. It means that, if you’re okay with long walks, you can safely stroll from a historical village as Stony Stratford to the centre:mk shopping centre in the middle of the city, never having to cross the dual carriageway at level! (There are, though, a few level crossing with side streets as well as the parking lots, which are impractical to avoid. Still, those are definitely more acceptable in my views.)

And this is where I fell in love with the idea of moving to Milton Keynes. While cycling has never been one of my hobbies, talking about it with a friend gave me an interesting idea. My main issue with cycling has always been my personal lack of balance – I’m not sure if it’s an actual physical issue or just a lack of skill, to be honest – but that means a trike (a three-wheels cycle) would make the issue moot for me. Unfortunately, trikes are exceedingly rare to begin with, in no small part because, in London, there’s no way you would be able to ride one on the cycle lane.

But, the Milton Keynes Redways are much wider, designed for families. So I went and looked, and eventually picked up a Cube Family Trike – not because I plan to use it to take kids in it, but because the Electric Bike Shop recommended it over the “Cargo” branded version, which just has a slightly different cover, and costed 20% extra – which is roughly the same width as a two-seater pram, and thus fits comfortably on Redways and similar cycleways in the area.

Why was I looking at a cargo trike, though? Well, as I said I don’t have a license, and neither does my wife. In London, our daily “top up” shopping was either done on the tube and bus, or by walking down to the Sainsbury’s Local corner shop. In our village in Milton Keynes, we currently don’t have an equivalent shop. There is a temporary shop, but the selection, quality, and pricing of the items sold is not great, and it’s not really suitable for the type of top-up shops we found ourselves needing. But there’s a Co-Op just 14 minutes cycle, almost all of which is on pedestrian/cycle shared ways, requiring only three motor traffic level crossings. So when we find ourselves needing something, that’s where I go.

Quite a few people, when they heard about my plan to buy a cargo trike, tried to dissuade me at it. Even the shop (who has been extraordinary in their customer service!) was not convinced I would be happy with it (but I am!) And I sort of see their point, because admittedly, a trike is not the easiest of the cycles to own.

Even though Milton Keynes is so much better than London when it comes to cycleways, the infrastructure is not really “designed” for trikes, obviously. It is rather than trikes are “compatible” for the most part with what is there. But for instance, good luck finding a good way to park and lock your trike. I have at this point learnt which places I feel comfortable enough to just leave the trike alarm “armed”, but they are few and far between, sometimes I find myself taking a car parking space to lock it, as the cycle bays are too small for it.

In one particular case, in an industrial estate where a coffee shop I enjoy is, the cycle parking space is almost perfect: it has a canopy to cover it up at least a bit, it has enough space in-between the locking places that even my trike fits… but then it suffers from two problems: the first is that even though you can see it from the Redway, you can’t reach it until you go all the way around the block, and the second is that the curb isn’t cut, and try as I might, I couldn’t get my trike onto it to lock it. I instead leave the trike in the front of the coffee shop even when I go to the stores (I checked with the owners that it’s okay for me to!)

There’s also a not-great issue when trying to cross the dual carriageway on one side of our village: you get to choose between going through an underpass and having to go uphill in one direction, or you can cross at level with a protected (traffic light) crossing. Except the protected crossing has an island in the middle, and my trike can’t turn into it. I did it once, feared for my life, and now take the underpass.

And, frankly speaking, the economics are not there, again almost certainly because there’s so little market for these. When I pre-ordered the trike in London, they did accept holding it for me for nearly six months (until we received the keys to the garage to safely store it in!) because they knew it would be unlikely they would sell it anyway — turns out they were wrong with that, they did sell it (but since I was not in a rush to receive it, everything was fine.) But that means there’s only a handful of these trikes in England, as they are, to my understanding, the only retailer holding them at least in London.

Cube is a German company, and while their ebike products are much closer to affordable, their etrike are still niche products. You can see how part of the trike frame is re-purposed from their bikes, including the in-tube storage, which takes the place of the battery (the trike has two battery bays under the cargo, though I only have one battery on mine, I don’t need that long of a range.) Thankfully most of everything that is specific to the trike is well engineered and implemented. The most annoying part is the Kiox display unit, that is supplied directly by Bosch. While the small display is meant to be able to handle turn-by-turn navigation with a compatible app, my experience with it has been quite terrible. I’m glad I took the suggestion of buying a Garmin bike computer instead, as its navigation is significantly more reliable, even if the UX itself is not something i’m raving about.

Speaking of navigation, Google Maps is completely useless in this part of England, when it comes to cycling (and to be honest also still a bit broken even just to find stores!) Despite the presence of Redways, Google tries to send you through dual carriageways when cycling. I have asked a few suggestions of other cyclists, and after trying a few I settled on Komoot. It integrates nicely with both Garmin (using their GPS) and Bosch’s own computer (for recording trips when I don’t need directions), and I believe leverages OpenStreetMap, which is much more aware of local conditions, and allows me to properly plan a nice bike ride out there.

With this taken care of, the feeling of freedom of being able to just grab the bike and go is actually quite exhilarating. And it has been very useful to have, particularly as for the first few months after moving in, we couldn’t get deliveries to the house from Evri, and I had instead to go up to a not-so-local shop to pick them up. And even after that, one delivery driver decided to not even try, and have me ride to the other side of Western Milton Keynes to pick it up, through a muddy trail that I’m not going to ride through again (I’m lucky my trike didn’t end up getting stuck in the mud, that was not a fun ride, and on the way back I updated Komoot to avoid that particular trail, it only did that because the main road that connects us to that side of the city is still not open, and the more bearable path is just… longer.)

If anything, the larger problem I found with having a cargo trike rather than a normal bike is that the accessories ecosystem is a bit more barebone. I’m using a GoPro as a dash cam (which doubled as a touristy action cam when we last visited Taiwan), but I looked at front-and-back bike dashcams before, but none are suitable to be positioned on the back of the cargo bay. Similar for bike lights, although the trike has already suitable lights wired in, which makes it a bit of a moot point (plus I only ever used the bike in the dark to pick up pizza at our local truck, and that truck is gone unfortunately.)

Anyway, so it is, my cycling story began, making me a bloke on a trike.

Where’s Basil? – Meeting the concrete cows of Milton Keynes – Brown Bear’s Big Day Out

Basil lived in Milton Keynes at one point and went to meet the concrete cows that are a well known feature.

Brown Bear’s Big Day Out is a story about a bear in a zoo that puts on a disguise so that he can escape and visit a funfair called Dizzyland. It’s about looking at people in depth and not being afraid because they look different from you. So Basil looks like a man when disguised but is still the same friendly and hero bear in this case once his disguise slips.

The story contains illustrations throughout the text. These are then repeated at the back of the printed book so that younger children can colour them in. One of them can be seen below.

The book is available globally from Amazon in both printed and ebook formats. This is the .co.uk link, https://www.amazon.co.uk/Brown-Bears-Big-Day-Adventures/dp/1980868859/, and this is for .com, https://www.amazon.com/Brown-Bears-Big-Day-Out-ebook/dp/B086DSF5N7/.

Our Etsy shop has blank greeting, birthday, invitation cards of the book’s cover artwork, https://junagarhmedia.etsy.com. Larger quantities of cards available.

We have printed this illustration and one of the photographs onto organic cotton T-shirts for children that are available from our Teemill website, https://scientistandphilosopher.com/collection/kids/.

Our links

See more of Gerry Newton’s wonderful art, https://www.geraldnewtonart.com/.

Our Teemill shop site for our organic cotton clothes and bags, https://scientistandphilosopher.com/.

My author page where you can discover more about my books, https://www.amazon.co.uk/-/e/B07D3ZTQ1L.

This is our website for all our photography and my books, https://www.junagarhmedia.co.uk/.

We are also on Flickr, https://www.flickr.com/photos/21104365@N06/.

Also on Instagram, https://www.instagram.com/junagarh_media/.

On Pinterest, https://www.pinterest.co.uk/paulpaddington2017/

Dom Whiting
Drum & Bass On The Bike
Milton Keynes
14 June 2026
https://domwhiting.co.uk/

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