When bicycle courier Emily Chappell first rode through the capital 10 years ago, she discovered a side of the city hidden from other road users. With cyclists in central London forecast to soon outnumber drivers, she looks at how the streets, and her part in them, have changed

I was shocked to realise last week that I’m approaching the 10-year anniversary of the day I started cycling in London, as a nervous first-time commuter with a lopsided backpack and a Transport for London cycling map stuffed down my top. As many do, I very quickly fell in love with the city as seen from the saddle of a bike, revelling in the curious sense of ownership that comes from knowing where things are, rather than just how to get there using the tube map.

For many others, that love affair is just about to begin. Last week TfL released figures predicting that, on present trends, there will be more bicycles than cars entering central London during rush hour in the next few years. The number of rush-hour drivers fell from 137,000 in 2000 to 64,000 in 2014, while the number of cyclists trebled, from 12,000 to 36,000.

This move towards cycling (and walking and public transport) is a major feat for any city, let alone one as big as London. But for me, a former cycle courier, the announcement brings both joy – for the new recruits to the road – and nostalgia.

The thrill of cycling for me has been partly about the sense of ownership of my city, but also a sense of perpetual discovery, because no matter how well you think you know a city like London, there will always be a few streets you’ve somehow missed.

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The city was my playground, but it also became my workplace, and although you can never know the place entirely, cycling through it day after day, month after month, season after season, meant that I could tell you not only how to get to any given street, but how that street had changed over the past year. The old buildings that had been hacked out of the skyline for taller ones to grow in their place; the plane trees that turn the place into a snowstorm of itchy pollen in May; intimate details like the slightly raised kerb where one street surface meets another at a junction, which two or three skinned elbows had taught me I had to make sure my front wheel hit at a certain angle, or risk being thrown indignantly to the ground.

One of the biggest changes in 10 years has been in the number of cyclists. When I started, just as the boom in urban cycling began to gather force, the roads were dominated by those stern men on their steel-framed racers, who might have been cycling into work since the late 1970s, long regarded as oddballs by their family and colleagues, and now regarding the rest of us with an old-timer’s contempt.

I was delighted when, as the years went by, the roads began to fill with so many cyclists that I found I had to stop giving them all the friendly nod of recognition with which we often greeted each other back in 2006, because it was getting ridiculous. But despite our numbers, our solidarity persisted. We would strike up conversations as we waited at the lights:

“Are you going left here?”

“No – are you?”

“Yes, but I’ll let you go first. Go on.”

“Cheers, mate!”

“No worries. Nice bike, by the way.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Emily Chappell. Photograph: Annalisa Brambilla

Cyclists seemed to want to talk to each other and be delighted at the chance to do so, unlike the frowning commuters I’d once shared the tube with, each intent on protecting their own tiny bubble of personal space.

Of course, with change there is always loss, and there is often an elegiac note to my conversations with other couriers as we reminisce dolefully over what has been and gone – the corner in Soho (now a building site) where we used to sit; the cheap Indian café (now a Starbucks) where we bought lunch; the skyline as it was in the 1990s; the workload as it was in the 1980s. Because despite the sense of ownership knowing the city by bike gives us, we don’t own an inch of it, and any of our boltholes could be taken away tomorrow by developers, roadworks, corporations or the whims of our fellow citizens.

Yes, I do have some small, shameful regrets about the booming number of cyclists in London. Back when we were fewer there was a glorious freedom in dancing through the traffic, whose rules and logic we learned so well that it often felt like a benevolent force, sheltering us as much as it threatened us. We were the pilot fish darting in among the sharks, the gazelles sprinting through herds of lumbering bison. Rarely was there a line along Oxford Street we couldn’t follow, and even at the busiest times of day you’d see couriers racing through the traffic as if it were a mirage, emerging from the shoulder-width gap between two red buses, leaning body and bike into a sharp left turn to reach the clear space along the gutter, breaking their speed with a sharp skid, and then picking it up again in order to crest the wave of the traffic as it broke through the changing lights.

Now that there are more cyclists, I often find the best lines blocked and someone slightly broader – or more cautious – sitting squarely behind the two buses, so I can’t squeeze into the narrow chasm between.

And London is now aware that it is becoming a cycling city. Every week, more of my journeys take place on well-built two-lane cycle tracks, segregated from the motorised traffic by kerbs and bollards. I tell myself over and over again that this is ultimately a good thing, that the city’s growing cycle infrastructure is giving more and more people a safe, healthy, enjoyable way to get to work, and that London is better for it. I remind myself that in less nostalgic moods I would be happy to see cyclists outnumbering drivers.

I wouldn’t go back to the bad old days, when cyclists were dismissed as a bunch of bearded eccentrics, and roads were designed to keep traffic fast, rather than to keep people safe. I welcome the long overdue improvements to cycling infrastructure, even as I secretly, somewhat guiltily, mourn the days when I used to have the traffic to myself.

Emily Chappell is author of What Goes Around: A London Cycle Courier’s Story, published by Guardian Faber, £12.99. To buy a copy for £8.99 with free UK p&p, go to bookshop.theguardian.com