The Street Riding Years: Despatching through 80s London

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.
Set in the late 70s and the following decade, this is the story of his start on bikes and subsequent years as an urban motorcycle mercenary. It was 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. The Street Riding Years was originally titled 'Adventures in Motorcycling'. The contents are the same.