Some of us remember Amsterdam’s White Bicycle Plan of the 1960’s. So when white bicycles, covered in flowers, and this time chained up quite permanently, started to appear on the streets of London, my first thought was that ever nostalgic new young artists were getting up to a bit of public self promotion.

And I wasn’t completely wrong. The Ghost Bikes did indeed start out as an artist’s project in San Francisco but were quickly adopted by bike awareness groups to act as memorials to killed cyclists and warnings to motorists.

The Dutch anarchist group The Provos who were responsible for the first White Bicycle Plan had several other ‘White Plans’ including the White Victim Plan which proposed that “anyone having caused death while driving would have to build a warning memorial – memento mori – on the site of the traffic collision by carving the victim’s outline one inch deep into the pavement and filling it with white mortar.” I am sure the Californian Artist behind the renaisaance of white bicycles would have been aware of this.

So I was moved last week to see a man from Hackney Council, armed only with a bucket of quick drying line marking paint and a yellow jacket, painting white bicycles in the middle of the road near the bike mecca of London Fields. The first thing I noticed was that he wasn’t using a stencil; each bicycle is a unique freehand image [some are better than others]. He moved down Broadway Market through the day and I counted at least 49 fresh white bicycles on the short ride between Goldsmiths Row and London Fields Station.

So were the Council paying their respects to lost pedallers in an area once infamous for anarchist squats? Or was it a case of some more DIY bike lanes?

The good news is that East London isn’t as dangerous as some parts of London. Check out this lovingly created Googlemap mashup.