The badge of the Cyclists' Touring Club adorns buildings all over the country. To the ordinary member today their presence may seem surprising: why should the symbol of a small club crop up in such a way and, indeed, be manifested in such relatively extravagant signs? The 24in-diameter cast-iron `wheels' are pretty heavy and usually they are firmly bolted to the masonry of the buildings they adorn - which is of course why they are still there after a hundred years. Other than deliberate monuments and some buildings, very few such casual artefacts of the late Victorian era remain today. The wheels were obviously expensive to manufacture, and probably even more so to distribute and affix, and are a small tribute to the vision and power of the early management of the Club. They date from the era when the bicycle was the fastest form of road transport, that brief period following its maturity as an invention and before it was swamped by the motor car.

The New Cyclists

The History
of the
Winged Wheels

The new `safety bicycle' of the 1880s and 90s increased the popularity of cycling among the richer and more leisured professional classes, making it more accessible to those who had been unwilling or unable to use the earlier High Ordinaries. The expectations of this class were higher, and their influence and spending power carried weight. They demanded, and got, a system of hotel and inn grading and discounts long before the AA came into existence and instituted its `star' ratings. Stanley Cotterell himself set up the first network of hotels after some false starts in 1879, six months after his founding of the CTC. He enlisted members' help and appointed regional officials who were later to be known as Consuls. By 1881 he had 785 establishments under contract, and proprietors jumped to enter into contracts with the CTC, offering fixed tariffs, reserved rooms and exclusive lounges for cyclists to use.

Winged Wheels

It was not until 1888 that the Club devised and placed its 2ft-diameter wheel on buildings as evidence that they were ‘CTC appointments'. Until that time proprietors had often made their own signs, opening up the possibility of fraud. Such was the competition for appointment that jealousy between establishments was often in evidence relating to the awarding of the coveted `Headquarters' - meriting tariff A, or `Quarters' - qualifying only for tariff B. The status was clearly shown by a small tab on the sign. By 1895 these tariffs were getting difficult to maintain and the structure was revised in favour of a discount system, while plain wheel signs with no inscription were issued. The old structure was phased out between 1897 and 1899. Club archives show that by 1902 discounts were enforced only by concerted effort and that by 1908 they had disappeared.

This follows the decline of fashionable cycling and the advent of the motor car pretty accurately, although it must be said that there is not much evidence to suggest that motorists negotiated their own special terms. It must have been as true then as now that you can't beat a cyclist for watching the pennies!