It doesn’t seem so easy these days for Critical Mass to visit the places where cyclists have been killed in the month proceeding each mass.

It was not always like this.

CM went to Brixton in memory of Marie Vesco in June 2008, the month she was killed.

Two main things made it possible: first, a big bunch of active people touched enough to use their grieving energy to produce and hand out leaflets urging the mass to go to Brixton and then to physically guide the mass by staying at the front of it (and of the police that accompanied the mass right until that month) and negotiating each turn. Second, a ‘culture’ or habit at the time, a custom to visit the places where a / cyclist/s had been killed the previous month.

That culture seems to have all but disappeared now. Some seem to think Critical Mass is not political. Some think that even cycling ‘is’ political in itself without needing to make it so. As political as a demo outside a prison. For example.