Exactly 35 years ago, my life changed for ever. On a sunny Saturday in July 1989 I emerged from Richmond Cycles in south west London with my first proper bike: a Peugeot Camargue tourer. I was about to discover a love of cycling and bikes that is as strong today as it was during that last, hot summer of the 1980s.

The Camargue was not my first bike. Mum and Dad gave me a shopper bike, the Raleigh Twenty, for my 11th birthday, and I cycled around Cardiff on it before selling it to my sister six years later. When I went to university I got it back, and it proved a useful way of getting around Leicester. The choice of that shopper bike showed how little my parents or I cared about bikes. I got rid of it when I graduated, with no intention of ever getting another cycle.

That all changed in July 1989. By then I was living in Teddington, Middlesex, and working in Holborn, central London. Rail strikes prompted thousands to cycle to work rather than get stuck in traffic. My friend Richard commuted by bike from Twickenham to the West End, and I was inspired by his example to get a bike. In the days before the internet, this meant popping into bike shops to review what was on offer and browsing through catalogues.

I liked the look of Peugeot Camargue, along with a very modern looking hybrid city bike, whose name escapes me. The Camargue was the only one in stock at Richmond Cycles (then based next to the Odeon cinema in Richmond – it is now over the river in East Twickenham), so I went for that.

I remember the joy of riding my first proper bike home to Teddington, along the river to Twickenham and then by road. It was only the second time I’d ridden a drop-handlebar cycle – at university, I had borrowed and crashed a road bike I’d borrowed from a friend. I got on better with the Camargue. I cycled for miles around Richmond, Twickenham and Teddington over that hot summer. (The photo above was on a ride from Teddington Lock through Ham to Richmond Park.)

The rail strikes ended just days before I bought the bike, but I was keen to try cycle commuting to the office in Holborn – 13.5 miles in, 13.9 miles back because of the one-way system around Piccadilly Circus.) After puzzling about directions in Putney on that first commute I learned to go with the flow as almost everyone on bikes was heading into town – no Garmins or Google Maps in 1989! One magical day I got every single traffic light from East Twickenham to Shaftesbury Avenue. It was a joy to ride through Richmond Park in the early morning or at dusk; when someone at work complained about their hellish Northern Line journey I’d joke about having to wait for a deer to cross my path! It wasn’t always so blissful: I had a frustrating run of punctures (two in one commute) and avoided the park with its flinty paths until I fitted more puncture resistant tyres.

After I bought my bike, I wanted to find out everything about my new interest. One of my first purchases was Richard’s Bicycle Book, by Richard Ballantyne. I loved Ballantyne’s passion for the bike and how it could change the world. He evangelised about how pedal-powered transport could reduce pollution, pointing out that living in a city was the same as smoking two packets of cigarettes a day. I noted his claim ‘there is no measurable rain 20 days a month, and it only rains during the rush hour 12 days a year’. I was reassured by this until I got absolutely soaked cycling home on my second day on the bike, sticking to the main Upper Richmond Road rather than my usual route through the park to get home more quickly.

Another favourite was The CTC Book of Cycle-Touring, by John Whatmore. (The CTC has since been renamed Cycling UK.) I was captivated by Whatmore’s nostalgic account of the freedom that his first bike gave him growing up in Birmingham in the 1930s. He found it on sale for 15 shillings in a junk shop and ‘ran all the way home and returned with the money, and … from that moment I lived in a dream world’.

That book included 80 cycle tours around Great Britain, and I enjoyed a few of them in those early years. I took the photo above on a 30 mile route from Marlow in 1990, which I remembered as a delightful ride in the summer sunshine, following the lanes through Waltham St Lawrence and Cookham. I loved the fast descent of Winter Hill back to Marlow. Little did I know that these would become local routes 12 years later!

Those early day rides led to more ambitious multi-day tours including a three day ride around the Isle of Wight in May 1993 and a nine day tour of the West Country two years later. Not to mention my biggest challenge yet, the 254 mile audax ride, London Wales London in May this year. All this followed from that milestone purchase in Richmond 35 years ago this weekend.

You can read more about my Peugeot Camargue and my other favourite bikes here.

PS: it’s striking looking at photos of me cycling in early 1990s that I’m in ordinary clothes – no lycra or helmets!