Get on your bike for Tweed Ride

GET your vintage clothes and bicycles ready, with the Ballarat Tweed Ride returning this May as part of Heritage Festival.

The event sees participants ride through the city’s autumn streets in vintage attire with rosettes awarded for best dressed and entertainment at the start and end of the route.

“The Ballarat Tweed Ride is a social cycling event about timeless style and having fun on a bike,” said founder Liana Emmerson.

“We all get on our bikes, have a bit of a chit chat and it’s very relaxed.”

The ride will begin at St Pat’s Cathedral Dawson Street at 11am on Sunday 18 May and all participants must register on the Ballarat Tweed Ride website.

This year’s route will be along the Sturt Street bike path allowing participants to choose the distance they would like to ride.

“This year we’ve made some adjustment because we’ve got some really amazing variation in the cycling capacity of participants,” said Ms Emmerson.

“Participants can hop off at any point and join when we pass back.”

This year there will also be a fair in the Cathedral Hall from 11am until 4pm featuring refreshments, kids’ entertainment, performances of the Magic Pudding by the Bard in Buninyong and a vintage fashion parade at 2pm.

Ballarat’s first Tweed Ride was held in 2012 with less than 10 participants and it is now an annual event on the Heritage Festival calendar.

“The community of people who are part of it are just brilliant,” said Ms Emmerson.

“It’s been cool people bringing the parts of cycling history that have connected with them to the event.”

Ms Emmerson said the ride is about remembering how the bike changed history.

“The bicycle was a cultural revolution in that it made people a lot more mobile and gave them autonomy in their lives, particularly women,” she said.

“Motor cars were an expensive thing to own and women didn’t even have a right to vote at this point.”