The Victoria Smart Bike – A Journey
9th March 2026
Creating The Victorian Smart Bike has been on my mind for a few months now – since receiving the brief back in January 2026. But bicycles themselves are never far from my thoughts as I have always loved them. I’m definitely not the typically wiry cyclist but have loved each of my bicycles as I have pedalled through life and noticed when I looked back at my camera roll that I spend a lot of time taking photos of them too. Below is a sample of the various bikes I have snapped and screenshotted over the years – interestingly the person pictured in the montage at 11 seconds is my grandfather, Jack Gellatly, pictured proudly on his bike around 1933 when the idea of a safety bicycle was still less than fifty years old.
I began to research the subject and stored my research materials in Notebook LM – which Matt taught us about last semester. It is a research marvel and enables me to read, store and interrogate information in a way I’d have thought unthinkable just a few months ago.
https://notebooklm.google.com/notebook/cb27c90e-7f10-4d53-83f0-ba6ee755d05a
I created the first images of The Victorian Smart on Midjourney which gave me the rather quirky bikes which you see above. My plan was to create something a little more practical that could be seen as actually existing in the world but I wanted to place my design in the future and quickly settled on 2085 which would see the 200th anniversary of Starley’s Rover Safety Bicycle and I have broadly stuck with that principle throughout the project as you will see from previous posts on this blog.
The next visual images were created with Google Gemini and much more closely aligned with my vision for The Victorian and I also made a couple of animated videos with the same tool at this point. The first is a ‘Virtual’ Tadej Pogacar:
And the second was a 2085 Champs Elysee with a peloton of Victorian Smart Bikes setting off on a race:
I followed up with a trip to the V&A Museum and then The Science Museum to embrace both the Victorian era – and Queen Victoria herself – to get ideas and inspiration for the project as this short ‘tourist’ video will show – it also includes at the end some shorts of class work which reinforced my belief that old technology is not necessarily obsolete and can be reimagined for the modern – and indeed future – age. The bells you will here are from Holy Trinity Brompton – close to the home of one of the most iconic bicycles of the 20th and 21st Centuries.
This led to a dreadful attempt at acting for an early iteration of my presentation idea. I am attempting to sound like a Victorian of 118 years old here and explain the involvement of Tadej Pogacar …
I wanted to create a user manual but soon realised I would vastly exceed the required presentation length but drew much pleasure from the creative process. In the end, I only began writing one chapter of the manual itself:
This led, finally to bringing all my thoughts together to create a PowerPoint presentation which I intended to deliver in class on Friday 17th April.
However, at 24 minutes I felt this version was still too long and decided to review the content, reduce the script and work on a shorter version which I will add to the next post.
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