Ink, sweat and gears
The Tour of Britain will make a welcome return to Yorkshire this year. And no one is more pleased than Harrogate artist and cyclist Martin Procter who has had his work featured in the prestigious cycling magazine Rouleur. Sally Clifford meets him. Main pi
There’s a synergy between creativity and cycling. Freedom, independence and being surrounded by inspiration as you pedal forth in fresh air is the perfect ambiance for thinking. For Martin Procter, creativity has been his life’s work, and he has no intention of stopping. He is content to go with the flow “until my eyes give up and my hands give out,” he says, nonchalantly. Martin developed a love and flair for art as a young boy and carried it through his life, eventually combining hobby and profession working on advertisements initially in the creative services department at The Yorkshire Post ,in Leeds, and as studio head at The Huddersfield Examiner, before returning to Leeds to teach graphics at Jacob Kramer College, now Leeds Arts University.
After leaving the former Leeds Modern School, he had hoped to study art at college. “To study to become a commercial artist not only did you have to have a portfolio of work, you also had to have a glowing letter from your headmaster and I had been caught smoking in the school’s cycle shed at the time so I didn’t get in,” muses Martin, the irony being that he did end up at the college – teaching there many years later before setting up his own studio 30 years ago.
Cycling came along during his teenage years. “I started riding road bikes and have done throughout my life. I had a period when my children were young when I gave it up for a while. I started again seriously in 2006 and I’ve been cycling ever since,” he says.
Over the years he has been involved in competitive cycling, road racing, cyclo cross and sportives, but it is a purely a pastime these days. “My cycling’s for pleasure now, but in my younger days I did compete in time trials, some amateur road racing and the occasional cyclo cross race. Over the last 10 years, I’ve taken part in quite a number of sportives.”
And the appeal? “It’s the freedom, the independence, being able to go where you like and the fitness aspect that attracted me to it – and the camaraderie of being in a cycling club, being able to get out and breathe good Yorkshire air.”
Martin joined the Cappuccino Cycling Club, a drop-bar road cycling club based in his home town of Harrogate, in 2010 shortly after it set up. Membership has grown over the years, and the club now has around 200 riders. Predominantly, the increase in popularity has been prompted by high-profile cycle races arriving in the region. In 2014, the 101st edition of Tour de France Grand Départ was staged in Yorkshire, and in 2019 the
UCI Road World Championships were held in Harrogate.
Recently it was announced that the Tour of Britain, the UK’s most prestigious cycle race, is returning to Yorkshire later this year. Stage three will take the riders through the North-East and Sunderland, with the peloton heading to Redcar, Cleveland and North Yorkshire for the fourth stage on September 7.
“Yorkshire has always been big into cycling anyway, but I think the Tour de France and the World Championships that came to Harrogate definitely boosted interest in it,” adds Martin.
Electric bikes are growing in popularity too, which Martin thinks might be to do with the lie of the land in Yorkshire. “People are getting interested in electric bikes. It’s a lot easier to get up the hills!”
Humour is a common theme among his work. Over the years he has produced artwork for highcalibre clients including Rouleur. The opportunity to become a contributing illustrator to the magazine came through the illustrated cycling journals he produced about the Cappuccino Cycling Club.
Martin started them to keep a record of the rides the club’s members embarked on, documenting details and humorous anecdotes along the way in words and illustrations.
“I wanted to keep a record of each of the rides so I could relive the routes I was doing. There is a description of the route itself, which one of my bike collection I was riding, how many miles we went etc.
“I used to do one journal each year – there would be over 100 entries per year recording the happenings on the ride, and often there was a humorous aspect to it, not just pictures of the Yorkshire Dales, more cartoony in a way.”
Some of the pages of Martin’s journals appeared in Rouleur in 2014 as part of the publicity for the Tour de France’s visit to the region. This led to him being invited to design the Tour de France cover for the prestigious magazine – a highlight of his career.