The Tweed Run: London's Most Dapper Bike Ride

I heard the Tweed Run before I saw it. A brass note wobbled out over the plane trees, followed by an accordion catching up a beat behind, and then a ripple of bicycle bells that sounded nothing like the impatient dinging of rush-hour commuters. I'd come to a park in central London on a bright Saturday at the end of April knowing only that something wonderfully silly was supposed to be happening here, and within about four minutes of arriving I understood exactly why.

A man in plus-fours and a feathered bowler hat was cycling in slow, contented circles near a picnic blanket. A woman in a paisley dress was drinking iced tea through a straw while balanced side-saddle on a vintage roadster. Nobody was in Lycra. Nobody was in a rush. I had found the Tweed Run, and I spent the next few hours doing what I do best: photographing strangers who were having an enormous amount of fun in extremely good outfits.

A Metropolitan Bicycle Ride With a Bit of Style

The Tweed Run bills itself, in its own charmingly understated way, as "a metropolitan cycle ride with a bit of style," and that phrase does a lot of work. It began in January 2009, dreamed up by Ted Young-Ing and Jacqueline Shannon, who put the idea out through London Fixed Gear and Single Speed, an online forum for cyclists.

The inspiration came partly from Jack Thurston's Tweed Cycling Club and partly from a run of vintage-themed group rides that had been quietly happening in northern England through the 1990s. What started as a gathering of a hundred or so enthusiastic amateurs on that first cold January morning has since become one of London's more reliable annual spectacles, growing steadily through the following years until organisers had to cap numbers for safety, first at around five hundred riders and eventually letting the event swell towards a thousand as infrastructure and route planning improved.

What's kept it going for well over a decade, I think, isn't nostalgia exactly, though there's plenty of that. It's the sheer generosity of spirit behind it. Nobody is required to own a title, a country estate, or even much tweed to take part; you just need to be willing to commit to the bit for one Saturday a year.

The event has become popular enough that tickets now sell out within days, sometimes hours, of going on sale, and the organisers have shifted from an early ballot system to straightforward first-come-first-served sales because demand simply outpaced whatever fairness mechanism they tried. The Tweed Run I watched, on Saturday the 26th of April 2025, was by every account another sell-out, with participants converging from all over the country and a fair few from abroad, all of them having planned an outfit for months.

Dressing for the Occasion

If you want to understand the Tweed Run, you have to understand that the dress code isn't a suggestion so much as the entire point of the exercise. The organisers ask riders to turn out in their "well-pressed best" – plus-fours, tweed suits, waxed jackets, flat caps, cravats, bow ties, capes, boater hats, brogues polished to a shine that seemed almost defiant against the London pavement. What struck me, camera in hand, was how much genuine care had gone into it.

This wasn't fancy dress pulled from a costume-hire rail the night before. People had sourced actual vintage pieces, had things tailored, had matched their socks to their waistcoats. One man I photographed was wearing a bespoke waistcoat entirely printed with illustrations from past Tweed Runs – a sort of wearable event history, buttoned up under a spotted bow tie, with a glass of something sparkling in hand and an enormous white moustache doing a lot of the visual heavy lifting.

The event leans into the theatre of it with actual competitions. Prizes go out for the best-dressed rider, the finest moustache, and the most elegantly decorated bicycle, which means that by mid-morning you start noticing people quietly one-upping each other – a hat with an actual pheasant feather here, a hand-embroidered saddle cover there.

There's an unmistakable Edwardian energy to the whole thing, somewhere between a garden party, a vintage motor rally and a very civilised protest against the tyranny of high-vis cycling gear. Someone told me once, and I believe it, that the organisers describe it as roughly the opposite of the World Naked Bike Ride, and having seen both events referenced in the same breath, I can confirm the comparison is entirely earned.

Through the Heart of London

The route is the Tweed Run's best-kept secret, in the most literal sense – organisers don't release it until roughly a week before the event, and even then it changes from year to year. Tradition holds it at around twelve miles, threaded through central London so as to take in as many of the city's grand set pieces as reasonably possible.

Past editions have wound past Buckingham Palace and the Houses of Parliament, along the kind of streets that already look faintly Edwardian if you squint past the traffic lights, which makes the whole procession feel less like an anomaly and more like the city briefly slipping back into an earlier version of itself.

Somerset House and St Paul's have both featured as gathering points in past years, and the muster point each year has its own quiet ceremony: breakfast sandwiches, a cup of tea, live music, and a send-off marked with an actual bugle call, because a starting pistol would apparently be far too modern.

What surprised me most, watching from the pavement, was the pace. This is not a race, and nobody rides it like one. The whole procession moves at a genial, unhurried roll, with riders chatting to each other, waving at bystanders, and occasionally stopping altogether so someone can adjust a hat that's slipped in the wind.

Halfway through the route, the entire ride pauses for tea and a picnic in a park, which is where I did most of my photographing that day: hundreds of riders sprawled out across the grass on tartan blankets, bicycles propped in long rows against tree trunks, hampers unpacked, paper cups of tea passed hand to hand. It has the unmistakable air of an enormous, extremely well-dressed family gathering, except that everyone arrived on a different decade's bicycle and nobody is actually related.

The ride reconvenes and finishes with cocktails and live music – a proper knees-up, by every description I've read, though I'll admit I left before the last toast was raised.

A Soundtrack of Tubas and Bow Ties

Some of my favourite frames from the day weren't of the cyclists at all, but of the musicians who'd turned up to serenade them. I found a trio playing beside one of the picnic stops – a man on sousaphone, its silver bell catching the light like a mirror, another working an accordion strapped across a cream linen blazer, and a third in a navy jacket and a patterned bow tie, singing while he played an acoustic guitar.

Nobody had asked them to be there in any official capacity, as far as I could tell; they'd simply shown up in character and started playing, because that's evidently what this crowd does. It's a small detail, but it tells you everything about the tone of the day: earnest without being self-serious, committed to a joke that everyone is in on together.

That sense of collective commitment showed up in the smallest details, too. I photographed a man in a deep bottle-green bowler hat with a single iridescent feather standing improbably upright from the band, chatting with someone in front of a red-brick, mullion-windowed building – the kind of ornate Tudor-ish facade London specialises in tucking behind its parks.

He wasn't performing for the camera; he simply looked like that on an ordinary Saturday, because for one day a year, looking like an extra from a 1920s newsreel is entirely ordinary among this crowd. Elsewhere, a rosette reading "Tweed Run" in racing-green ribbon was pinned proudly to a wicker basket, the sort of touch that made it clear these weren't casual participants dabbling in a theme — they were regulars, decorated like show ponies at a county fair, and thoroughly enjoying themselves for it.

Bicycles in Their Sunday Best

It isn't only the riders who dress up. The organisers are explicit that any bicycle is welcome, but the spirit of the day clearly rewards a vintage frame, a leather saddle, and – ideally – a wicker basket stuffed with something seasonal. I spent a good ten minutes crouched by one bicycle simply because its front basket had been filled with yellow roses and tulips, stems overflowing onto the handlebars, a leather satchel strapped beside it and a small brass bell polished to a gleam.

It wasn't an outlier. Up and down the rows of parked bicycles, baskets had been dressed with fresh flowers, ribbons, and the odd Union Jack bunting, turning what would ordinarily be a bike rack into something closer to a florist's window display.

Even the bicycles' identifying numbers – every Tweed Run rider is issued one, pinned to a jacket or clipped to a basket – got absorbed into the general aesthetic, printed on cardstock that looked deliberately old-fashioned rather than issued by a modern events company.

Roadsters with cream-walled tyres and drum brakes were common, as were the kind of heavy, upright bicycles your grandparents might recognise, though I also spotted the occasional Santander hire bike pressed into cheerful, if slightly less photogenic, service.

The bicycles that won the day's unofficial admiration contest, in my unscientific survey of the picnic blankets, tended to be the ones with the most flowers and the least logic – panniers overflowing with cut blooms, tweed jackets draped over crossbars, a hand-painted sign reading "RIDER" tucked into a basket alongside a small green umbrella, as if anyone here was likely to need protecting from anything more threatening than spring sunshine.

Watching (or Joining) the Tweed Run

The Tweed Run has settled into a firm annual rhythm: it runs on a Saturday in April, generally the last weekend of the month, and the exact date for the following year is usually confirmed several months in advance on tweedrun.com, along with a note on when tickets go on sale – often at a specific hour, like noon, because demand is high enough that a vague "available soon" would cause chaos.

The organisers keep both the muster point and the full route under wraps until roughly a week before the event, released only to ticket holders, so if you want to watch rather than ride, your best bet is to keep an eye on the Tweed Run's own social media channels and website in the days immediately before, when the route is finally published for anyone hoping to catch the procession from the pavement.

If you'd rather take part than spectate, registration happens entirely through the official Tweed Run website, and it is worth setting a reminder for whatever date they announce sales will open, because tickets have sold out within days in recent years. Pricing has hovered in the region of £49 per rider, which typically covers your place on the ride, the midway tea and picnic stop, and the closing celebration, though it's worth double-checking the current year's ticket page for exact inclusions, since details can shift slightly year to year.

You don't need to own a vintage bicycle to take part – the FAQs point riders towards a handful of bicycle hire companies for anyone who wants the aesthetic without the storage problem – but you absolutely do need an outfit, and turning up under-dressed rather defeats the purpose of a day built entirely around dressing up.

One practical note for spectators: the midway tea and picnic stops take place in parks under licence, and non-riders generally aren't permitted into those specific picnic areas, so the best views tend to be along the open route itself, where the whole delightfully absurd procession — tubas, flower baskets, moustaches and all — rolls straight past anyone lucky enough to be standing on the right corner of London that Saturday.

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All photos were taken by Ina/WithinLondon, unless stated otherwise.