The Street Riding Years: Despatching through 80s London - Softcover

Chris Scott

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0993046525 ISBN 13: 9780993046520

Publisher: Chris Scott Books, 2022

Synopsis

Chris Scott is best known for his acclaimed travel bibles, including the Adventure Motorcycling Handbook and Sahara Overland. It’s less well known that by the end of the 1980s he’d had many more motorcycles than birthdays.

Originally titled and ‘sold as Adventures in Motorcycling’ (read many Amazon Customer Review there), this is the same book with a new cover, set in the late 70s and the following decade. It is the story of Chris Scott’s start on bikes and subsequent years as an urban motorcycle mercenary, an era when badly behaved messengers capitalised on London’s economic revival, squatting was easy, Thatcherism polarised the nation and rioting was a frequent response to it.

Despatch riding on everything from classic Brit twins to thundering Italian street racers, demented dirt missiles and nitrox-injected dinosaurs, his story includes a brush with Class War and regular spells in hospital.

Chris Scott’s sensible overlanding guidebooks advise how it should be done. ‘The ‘Street Riding Years’ is not that kind of book.

About this title

Review

"This is wonderful. Funny, engaging, nostalgic, frank and written with a tremendous swagger ... breathtakingly good at evoking time and place... a glimpse into a way of life that's starting to take on the air of myth and legend. - Ride magazine 'Book of the Year'

"It's the best book of any sort I've read for about five years, not just the best book involving bikes." - Austin Vince, Adventure film maker

"Chris writes in an entertaining and articulate style, managing to combine a comprehensive history of the era's bikes with a taste for the music, culture and turbulent political scene... It's a motorbike trip with a difference, a journey through an era, where the characters are as much the bikes as the people involved. I can thoroughly recommend it to anyone who rode back then... or those who would like an insight to what are now the 'good old days.'" - South East Biker magazine

"This really is a magnificent contrast from the sensible, detailed and well planned pajama-ironing handbooks of how riding should be done. This is about all the glorious life affirming screw ups you do along the way... and hope to live to write about the tale." - Motorcycle Explorer Magazine

Edition details

• Publisher: Chris Scott Books
• Publication date: 2022
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0993046525
• ISBN 13: 9780993046520
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 367