Johno Verity glides past the dappled face of the V&A, and circles back, arm outstretched and pointing to the explosion-marked crevices in the sandstone: “it’s a kind of memorial of the war… you can imagine how incredibly destructive it all would have been,” he tells his 139k Instagram followers, his now-iconic hot pink hat foregrounding a purple-blue sky.
It’s 4:15am, and Verity is out for another one of his early-morning rides in London.
“I just absolutely love having the city to myself and being on a bike,” he told Cycling Weekly.
“I just think it’s so cool… this magical feeling of cruising around when it’s a complete ghost town, just having the whole place to yourself.”
But Verity doesn’t just cycle round the city at the crack of dawn, he learns about the history of the UK’s capital, too – and brings us along for the ride.
“My dad died of dementia, and I thought that I needed to start learning stuff that’s good for my brain. I’ve always woken up aggressively early, so I just thought – go and explore London on one of these electric public bikes, and just talk about history.”
In Smithfields, we learn about the ‘Bodysnatchers’, who would illegally sell bodies (at £8 each) for medical research in Saint Bartholomew’s hospital in the early 1800’s. In another video, we learn about the Victorian gas holders in Kings Cross, and about Boudicca’s rebellion against the Roman’s in Londinium: “What a legend.”
“The thing that I’m really fascinated with at the moment is the 1600s, and the very late 1500s when the East India Company was created. Forget about Amazon and Google – this was big. It was absolutely vast, and it created monumental [wealth] inequality, and then that’s basically when they built up places like Mayfair, and Hyde Park, and all those incredibly grand areas of London which look very different to the old East End, which would have been a complete cesspit,” Verity explains in his signature style – always eloquent, always accessible, like he’s sharing something exciting with a friend, the thrill of learning something new still fresh as he rides handsfree on his rental bike.
“That was, [in the] 1700s and now when I cycle around London, it all really just starts to make sense: this is when this was built, and that’s why that looks like that… and then also huge things like the Blitz, and then you’re like, okay, that’s why everything’s been built since the 1950s in that area… Yeah, you’ve asked me the wrong question,” Verity laughed, putting the breaks on his excited meander through London’s history.
“I really remember a time – and it wasn’t that long ago – where, if someone said, oh, like the 1300s or the 1700s I’d be just like – that’s old stuff. And now I’m starting to really get an understanding of how things were working and what was changing and what was creating those changes. And so I’m getting a much clearer idea of the story of the progression of history, and how London affected the world […] I just find it incredibly satisfying to be piecing together all of these bits of the puzzle.”
Verity is a natural storyteller. Back in his pro-ski days in the early 2000’s, he produced ‘Being Johno Verity’, a video that went out in snowboarding and skiing ‘video magazine’ called Snowfix, complete with stop-frame giant naked mole rats and mountain vistas. Social media is a new, but no less exciting challenge for the 49 year-old who decided to properly try his hand at social media a few months ago on a filming trip to Greenland.
Since then, Verity has been to New York, bolstered by a cohort of new Greenlandic followers chasing the work of his late father, Simon Verity who was a master sculptor and stone carver. Several more of his videos have gone viral, and he’s met people in parks in the early hours inspired by his account to get outside. Right now, he’s working on a film out in New Zealand, but he’s feeling the pull back to London’s sunrise streets.
“We’re about to hit into winter, so I won’t be getting those really incredible early morning super dawns at like four o’clock in the morning,” he said. “I think I’m correct in saying that in the winter the sun has slightly more of an angled trajectory up through the horizon, and it gives you the slightly longer, more drawn out dawns. I love it.
“I just absolutely love having the city to myself and being on a bike. And who’d have thought it? That a middle aged guy with a pink hat banging on about the history of London would do so well.”
