If Daniel Fox-Davies wants to get more inner-city kids into polo, he needs to get wheel. Horse polo is played with ponies and equipment costing thousands of pounds, and a pitch 300 yards by 160 yards. Despite Jodie Kidd's encouragement, this makes it completely inaccessible to most kids in inner London.

However, polo, which is one of the oldest organised team sports, can be played using a variety of pitches and mounts. Just as the horse disappeared from London's streets once people had realised how much more efficient the bicycle was, so, too, should potential polo players eschew equestrianism in favour of cheaper mounts, and smaller, lower-maintenance pitches.

Hard-court bicycle polo, which was devised by Portland bicycle messengers in the late 1990s, requires little more than a patch of concrete or tarmac, six bikes and mallets, a ball and four traffic cones. Although you can now buy purpose-built polo bikes, most polo players assemble their own from cheap parts. Mallets can be made in minutes from secondhand ski-poles and off-cuts of plastic gas pipe, although some players use bamboo and other, more esoteric, materials, such as titanium.

The basic rules are simple: don't put a foot down, only shots off the short end of the mallet count, and don't be a dick; three players to a team, first to five goals the winner. The goals are usually set to a little wider than the length of a bicycle, and the pitch is whatever you can find. Although not used as much as it once was, the basketball court at the top of Brick Lane hosted many informal games, and the first ever London bike polo tournament in 2007.

And hardcourt polo is truly a growing inner-city sport – unlike horse polo. Some of the most popular bike polo spots are in Hackney, and there are often sessions on the upper floors of the Peckham multistorey car park in south London. The first ever European Hardcourt Bicycle Polo Championships were held in Southwark in a school playground (a London team lost the final to a team from Geneva).

The London Bike Polo League is in its second season, and is being contested by 17 teams, and the London Hardcourt Bicycle Polo Association organised sessions (funded by Play Sport London) for novices last summer, which were attended by over 100 new players. Hardcourt's older brother, which is played on grass, was once a demonstration sport at the 1908 Olympics, and, although not as popular as it once was, is still regularly played at international level.

With teams all over North America and Europe playing hardcourt every week (in some cases, every day of every week), the bicycle looks like the future of polo; whereas the horse looks like what it is – fit for the sport of kings, but completely impractical for the rest of us.