The courier job sounds simple; pick up a package on one side of town and drop it off on the other. A great value advantage for busy companies, messengers navigate the city traffic more efficiently than any motorbike or car, with the controller back in the office juggling each of them like pawns on an urban chessboard; their radio and PDA always on. Couriers get paid an average of £3 per delivery, riding sixty to eighty miles per day and making an average of around £65 per day. They perform a peripheral and dangerous job that is lonely when it is busy, and frustrating, if not boring, when it is slow. Self employed on a sub-contractor basis, they absolve their employers from any responsibility, financially or otherwise. Cash-in-hand at the end of the week with no questions asked makes them free, but on the other hand it means no insurance, no reimbursements for bikes, clothing, communications, accidents, no sick pay, no holiday pay and tax. Nothing, apart from a payment system that promotes a subtle atmosphere of jealousy and competition when the bottom line becomes money. However, despite and because of this, a sense of camaraderie is common within the messenger scene. So common and pervasive that it creates in fact a real community, a “bunch of random people” (as they describe themselves) bonded together because of two loves: the bike and the beer. They work together, they party together, they do things together, they even look a bit alike, they moan at each other and fight and then look after each other again. It is Thursday, late afternoon, after work, I stop at the Duke on Clerkenwell Road. Standing outside, I cannot help but stare at the fast, sexy cyclist heading east from the center of town. The road goes slightly downhill, quite wide with no traffic lights. At that time of day, when the sun is out, giving warm light and long shadows, cycling is a real treat. One after another, young men and women on sleek bikes, clearly not amateurs on their two wheels, or commuters, make their ride back home in a smooth flow.
Friday evening, another pub, the Foundry in Old Street. An anarchy of frames and wheels locked to one another, colorful and funky, rather impressive. Everybody’s hats and gloves, wearing cyclist shoes, big oneshoulder bags with radios, talking loudly. “It’s Friday night, couriers always come here after work”. I talk with Scott and Wookie, Earl, Ray and Wayne and I start spending time with them. The more I do it the more I see a family displaying its dynamics in front of me, like in a real extended and somehow dysfunctional family. Different people play different roles, the crotchety uncles and mouthy youngsters, the lonesome and the couples, the parents and the kids. Like different characters are part of the same plot, each one with his or her own history but also a role in the story of the community. Small or large it doesn’t matter, these people look to me like a solid group. All different and all somehow the same, and all, for some reason, caught up in this job, messengers share a lust for freedom and slices of life that run deep into brotherhood and anxiety. “Easy to get in, difficult to get out, you become addicted to it…. at the moment I hate it, but I know that if I ever quit it I will miss it. The job itself is crap, but the people are lovely!” This book wants to represent both the story of the people who work as bicycle couriers in London today and the community that they are part of. Annalisa Brambilla