To Hell in One of These? Sure.

Thanks to Reader C in New Zealand for sending me this remarkable essay at an equally remarkable website (which we’ll come to in a moment) about handcarts.

The essay is about rediscovering the handcart: a push-chair like platform designed for carting things around in an urban environment. It goes on the footpath, not the road and has many sensible things going for it:

Unlike a van or a car, my handcart doesn’t need gasoline, electricity, or batteries, making it entirely independent from energy infrastructures. Neither do I need to pay taxes and insurance. The handcart is a very democratic vehicle. It allows anyone to carry a load wherever they want, while older, less affordable cars and vans are no longer allowed to enter city centers due to the installation of Low Emission Zones.

It is also, of course, slow, which is subversive.

When people ask us why we don’t use it as a bike trailer, we can also answer differently: why the rush? Deciding to travel with the slowest vehicle possible is subversive because it questions values we take for granted in the modern world, such as speed and utility.

To many people, walking a handcart seems like a waste of time, but our experience is exactly the opposite. Every trip is an adventure, and we always look forward to using it again. It’s a pleasure to drive the vehicle, more like steering a boat than driving a land vehicle. It’s easy to chat with other pedestrians, who tend to be very curious about our vehicle. Consequently, the trip takes even longer.

The article gets more and eccentric — and therefore more and more reasonable — as we go along. It ends up talking about the handcart as a place to sleep, a place to work (as a digital nomad), and finally as a way for you to sail along on roller skates.

We could increase the speed of the handcart by using a larger sail, and combining it with roller blades, inline skates, or a skateboard. In that case, the cart would pull the driver in good winds.

This brilliant article, which surely deserves some sort of award, comes from a website called Low-Tech Magazine. “You’ve probably already come across Low-tech Magazine,” says Reader C in her email to me. Whenever someone starts an email that way, it will inevitably be completely new to me!

The website looks into forgotten and analogue technologies and asks if they can still be useful. It rejects the assumption that high-tech is always better. Magnificently, the website’s server is run on solar juice. You can see the panels on the guy’s balcony if you like.

And those images? They’re “dithered,” apparently, which is more energy efficient. I’d say they’re very stylish and interesting to look at as well. They remind me of reading, specifically the Financial Times on paper, which is far lovelier and easy-on-the-eye than conventional Web photography. Every little corner of this website has been considered carefully and robustly engineered. What a find!

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Don’t forget about New Escapologist though. Issue 18 is available in our shop.