Laura Laker

Laura Laker is a freelance journalist with more than a decade’s experience covering cycling, walking and wheeling (and other means of transport). Beginning her career with a cycling website called road.cc, Laura has since written for national and specialist titles of all stripes, including the Guardian and Bloomberg – as well as specialist publications.

Laura is one part of the well-loved Streets Ahead podcast, now in its fifth year. The podcast’s back catalogue includes interviews from Alexei Sayle, Chris Boardman, Dame Sarah Storey, former Welsh minister Lee Waters, and an exclusive interview with former transport minister, Louise Haigh. Haigh arranged the bike ride after reading Laura’s book.

Laura sometimes appears as a talking head on TV and radio, and in real life at conferences and festivals. In 2024 her first book, Potholes and Pavements: a Bumpy Ride on Britain’s National Cycle Network, was published. In it she heads off around the UK, some of it on her pink electric bicycle. She wanted to answer the questions, what if we were less reliant on our cars? What if there were safe cycling paths to take us places instead? What if those paths led to the next town, the next village and the countryside beyond? And if we had a proper national network of routes, what would it look like, and how do we get from here to there?

Laura grew up in rural west Somerset, and studied in Swansea and Cardiff before settling in London almost 20 years ago. She studied nutrition before pivoting to journalism and discovering cycling’s transformative potential in our everyday lives. In 2019, with the University of Westminster’s Active Travel Academy, she led on the UK’s first media reporting guidelines for road collisions. The guidelines encourage accurate use of language when describing crashes, from ditching the word ‘accident’, to describing a driver, not just their vehicle. She continued this work, with the Foundation for Integrated Transport, working with emergency services and professional bodies, and spoke in Parliament on the topic.

Laura is currently working on a project to help empower rural communities in pushing for traffic-free walking and cycling paths. Inspired by her book, she saw how transformative traffic free paths can be, but how difficult they are to deliver. In 2024 she was shortlisted for BikeBiz Woman of the Year. The book has been shortlisted for the People’s Book Prize and the 2025 Vikki Orvice Award for Women’s Sports Writing.