[snip]

>>> Hello
>>>
>>> As an assistant at the Geneva University of Art and Design I'm 
>>> doing  a
>>> research about the history of urban furniture, including the bike 
>>> rack.

[snip]

When I was growing up just outside London in the 1950s we didn't use 
bike racks for short term parking.  We just propped  a pedal against 
the kerb, and let the bike stand up by itself.  As I recall, German 
and Dutch bikes did have built in stands, which admittedly are more 
secure than just using a pedal, so they would have had even less need 
for a rack

Mind you, in those days there was less crime.  Evening newspapers 
used to be sold by the newsvendor just leaving a pile of papers on a 
stand,  unmanned, with a cloth cap full of change, so that anyone 
could help themselves to a paper and put in the money, helping 
themselves to change, if needed.

That points out that if there is no crime, you don't really need 
racks, except to attract people away from trying to lean their bikes 
against the shops' plate glass windows.

There were, universally, racks at workplaces and schools, of the type 
Dave Holladay mentions.  As he implies, space saving may have been 
the main motive.  It is a slight nuisance heaving the bikes onto 
their stands, so they would have been unpopular for short term 
parking.

Oxford and Cambridge, then even more bike towns than they are now, 
did have a bike theft problem.  The usual solution was to try to have 
a bike older and more decrepit than anyone else's. It got to be a 
sort of inverse status symbol to have a particularly horrible bike.

I don't remember the modern Sheffield stand/Philadelphia rack before 
about the 1970s.  It was, presumably, invented independently in, I 
suppose, Sheffield and Philadelphia.  Why nobody thought of the idea 
before (if they didn't) I don't know.  In the USA, where I lived 
then, there was a wave of more complicated racks, designed to secure 
both wheels and frame, and to avoid the need to carry anything more 
than a padlock.  They tended to be too complicated for people to work 
out how to use them, and some kinds were low enough to the ground so 
that people tripped over them.  Besides, you needed to carry the lock 
and chain or U-lock (when invented) anyway, to park in other places.

Bike lockers came in a year or two later.  In addition to bicycles, 
they proved useful sleeping places for the homeless, and product 
warehouses for the retail drug market.  Reputedly London's Honour Oak 
train station had to remove theirs, because they were being used by 
prostitutes.

Before World War I, I imagine that stables would have been at least 
as common as indoor parking now, and bikes could have been parked 
there.

I have an extract from "Living in London" by GR Sims ed, 1902.  It 
has a chapter, "Cycling London" by C.Duncan Lewis.  That seems to 
cover the scene fairly thoroughly.  It says nothing about racks, or 
storing bikes at all, but does describe the passenger trains out of 
Paddington needing a special van to carry the passengers' bicycles.

Jeremy Parker