Bikers' Bookshelf

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.

Originally titled and ‘sold as Adventures in Motorcycling’ (read many Amazon Customer Review there), this is the same book with a new cover, set in the late 70s and the following decade. It is the story of Chris Scott’s start on bikes and subsequent years as an urban motorcycle mercenary, 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.

Chris Scott’s sensible overlanding guidebooks advise how it should be done. ‘The ‘Street Riding Years’ is not that kind of book.