George Pilkington Mills - Land's End-John O'Groats

Land's End-John O'Groats

The record from one end of Britain to the other is the longest place-to-place challenge recognised by the Road Records Association. Riders choose their own route but the distance then, before ferries shortened it, was about 900 miles. The first record was set by J. Lennox, first name not known, who took six days and 16 hours in 1885 while being paced by tandems. The following year, Mills, who was 18, broke the record twice, once on a large-wheeled penny-farthing bicycle and once on a tricycle. He rode the bicycle in five days, 1 hour 45 minutes, the tricycle in 5 days 10 hours, an improvement of 29½ hours. The record, on a penny-farthing, still stands. Mills was helped by other members of the Anfield Bicycle Club, who organised accommodation and food, and enrolled other cyclists to guide him.

The journalist and official Frederick Thomas Bidlake said:

The sensation was not that he was merely one of a sequence of record breakers, but that he knocked more than a day off each of the previous bests, in a sort of double event, riding virtually without sleep, certainly no more than a wayside nod.