A moving map for a ride around Britain

Carlton Reid set off from Newcastle today, World Bicycle Day, on a three-month, 4,500-mile ride around Britain. He’s researching history-themed bike rides for a book: 3,000-year-old holloways in Dorset, the Stanegate Roman road to Hadrian’s Wall, the favourite rides of Victorian cyclists such as H. G. Wells and Thomas Hardy, and plenty more. I built the website, including a map where you can follow his progress.

It’s the second site I’ve built for Carlton. He asked me after we’d finished British Cycle Tracks.

No extra work on the road

The one rule was that Carlton shouldn’t have to do anything extra. Three months on the bike is enough to be getting on with, without updating a website at the end of each day. So he records his rides on Strava as he always does, and everything else happens by itself.

When he saves a ride, Strava lets my code know. It fetches the route and any photos, and posts the ride to the website as a page of its own, with a map, the distance, climbing and time, and a gallery. The Follow my progress map draws every ride so far, with Carlton’s face at the end of the latest one, so you can see where he’s got to.

I’m looking forward to following along.

Update, November 2026: Carlton made it round, and the map above shows the whole trip. I enjoyed following his progress, watching the map and the posts magically update, and Carlton’s photos and writing were excellent. They made it a pleasure to follow.

In February 2026 I rebuilt the code from scratch using nothing but its own architecture notes, to see whether they were complete enough to rebuild from. They were.