The Tour de France has just passed through Sheffield. There must be an enormous amount of writing concerning different ways that this race affects people and places. Over the two days the tour was in Yorkshire they estimate 2 ½ million people were out watching it. The tour is always followed by helicopters which give a birds eye view of the race as it winds across the hills and through the countryside. In my case the tour past less than 100 yards from my house. Earlier it had gone through the village of Bradfield where there is a Norman Motte of which I am very fond. On the third day the stage began on Parker’s piece in Cambridge and then, according to my father, later in the stage passed very close to Canning Town. These are all places that I have loved and in which I have spent time. My first impression of the tour was that it was a remarkable piece of landscape intervention, linking places via other places, populating a particular lying through with people, claiming routes as belonging to people. However after my father mentioned Canning Town I realised that the tour did something else. It offered a linking together of memory. A route which was sufficiently long to allow for people to weave their own biography.