Architects in Enjoyment: Fun and Politics in the Swedish Cycling Experience, 1918–39

Abstract

Interwar Swedish cycling offers an opportunity to consider the relationship between fun and politics in sport. A collection of sources which reveals that light-hearted fun was central to the experience of cycling, whether through enjoying the landscape, adventuring abroad, or cycling with friends and family, also shows that cycling was connected intricately to the policies of the Swedish Social Democratic Worker’s Party (SAP). The SAP programme unlocked cycling for swathes of Swedes, but, more profoundly, enjoying riding a bike also helped to foster new attitudes and behaviours which converged with SAP policies. Simply having fun when cycling encouraged new approaches to nature and travel abroad, and new patterns of sociability, which made cyclists architects, together with the SAP and other leisure time and outdoor organisations, in constructing the new type of society that emerged in interwar Sweden.