URBAN DIRT BIKING I Spencer Murphy. Carlton’s Strip, Croydon, London, England

Shining a headlamp on the latest biking sub-culture, straight outta Croydon. Photography by Spencer Murphy.

girl guy urban dirt bikers with dog spencer murphy croydon

Tricky one this one. If you ever frequent the scrublands and industrial estates of London’s hinterland you might have caught a glimpse of the odd masked rider on an off road motorbike, doing a wheelie up and down the road. You probably heard them first though. That fine Taylor Wessing winning photographer, Spencer Murphy, shone a spotlight on the Urban Dirt Biking scene in his book of the same name. Alternatively known as BikeLife, doing stunts on off road bikes on the public highways began in the USA but snowballed in the UK alongside the rise of Instagram.

What seems on the surface to be an intimidating environment won Spencer over with it’s strong sense of community. Biking can give people a focus as well as a sense of belonging. As he said in a Guardian article in 2017 ‘I met people from the age of eight to 34, many of them family men with nine to five jobs. What seemed universal was that this was a release from modern day life, something that kept the youth out of trouble and helped the elders forget theirs’.

This is the latest in a long line of UK sub cultures from the mods to the rockers, the punks to the skins. BikeLifers generally meet up in the edgelands to avoid trouble and the police, but how does society integrate groups on the edge? Do they or us even want integrating? For many youth movements it’s the illegality that provides the excitement. In Cleveland, in the USA, the council have just given approval for an urban dirt bike park in the city. Like Peckham BMX or Dundee Skatepark, this provides a much needed social focus and the opportunity to encourage silencers on the bikes’ exhausts!

With characteristic modesty and generosity Spencer says ‘People on the peripheries should be celebrated, not demonized…..we need to make room for them, and learn from them.’