'The Locksmith is coming for you all': Glasgow’s anti-cyclist vigilante

One recent Tuesday morning, I wheeled my bicycle out and was about to pedal off when I noticed a small padlock attached to the rack. It took a moment of sleepy contemplation before my mind registered that this object wasn’t mine. Crouching to examine it, I observed a sticker affixed to the lock, bearing a warning in neat, printed capital letters. It read:

‘PAVEMENT RIDERS

RED LIGHT JUMPERS

LIGHTLESS FOOLS

THE LOCKSMITH IS COMING FOR YOU ALL’

I started, half-expecting to see a masked culprit pointing and cackling at my street corner. Adrenaline whirring my brain into action, I considered when this apparent vigilante might have struck. Not in the stairwell, I reasoned, it’s locked and neighbours have bikes there too.

I replayed the previous evening in my head: cycled to Woodlands, had a couple of drinks with a pal in The Doublet (Erdinger Alkoholfrei, as I had my wheels), got my bike from outside the bar, then pedalled back home to the Southside. Surely this was the moment the Locksmith had struck? I must have missed their calling card whilst unlocking my bike in the dark, and then re-securing it once home. 

But why me? I’m not a pavement rider. Nor a red light jumper. And I’d cycled to The Doublet lit up like a Christmas tree, along the segregated cycle lanes of the South City Way. I must’ve been targeted randomly, I thought.

Who would go to such lengths? The Locksmith’s protest obviously necessitated several steps of preparation: the padlock, the sticker, the menacing little catchphrase which surely must have taken a bit of workshopping. All of this indicated an unsettling dedication to their cause. 

I was worried. In recent years, I have felt hostility towards cyclists is on the rise. With Nigel Farage dehumanising us as a “strange swarm of insects” in The Daily Mail and football manager Joey Barton tweeting that Jeremy Vine is a “big bike nonce,” might this media circus have stirred up actual protests? The Locksmith was the first instance of a specifically anti-cyclist action in Glasgow I’d experienced, or heard of. But what if it was not the last?

As a freelancer, with time, energy and a need for good stories to pitch, my next move was obvious. I would channel a Raymond Chandler protagonist, albeit with less style and more bicycle, and hop onto the trail of the Locksmith. I had questions demanding answers: Who is the Locksmith? What do they want with the cyclists of Glasgow, beyond giving them a fright? Were these stickers a homemade deal? And why had they targeted a law-abiding, helmet wearing dweeb like me?

I cleared my plans for the day, secured the lock with a zip tie to prevent it from jiggling into my spokes and began cycling to Gear Bikes on Gibson Street to start the hunt. The shop sits just round the corner from The Doublet. Perhaps, I reasoned, they’d be familiar with the Locksmith’s work.