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The Highcycle – Social Distance Bike

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A British inventor just solved social distancing by building straight up instead of staying six feet apart.

While most of the world spent early April 2020 figuring out how to stay two meters apart in supermarket queues, Colin Furze decided to solve the problem vertically. The British inventor, plumber-turned-YouTuber, and serial builder of things that should not exist welded together a roughly two-meter-tall bicycle in his workshop and rode it straight to the grocery store during the UK’s lockdown. He called it the Highcycle, and the pitch was simple: if the rule is two meters of distance, why not just get two meters tall?

• Furze built the Highcycle with a vertically extended stainless steel frame that lifts the rider’s saddle roughly two meters (about 6.5 feet) off the ground.
• The bike runs on extended chains and a custom steering linkage that connects the elevated frame down to standard-sized wheels.
• Furze rode it through public streets and into a local grocery store, noting that pedaling in a straight line was manageable but cornering was genuinely difficult.

Building a Bike That Solves Distancing the Wrong Way

Furze’s shops-and-garages approach to invention has made him a fixture on YouTube for building oversized, over-engineered, and occasionally dangerous machines, and the Highcycle fits squarely into that catalog. Instead of buying a tall bike frame, he fabricated one from scratch, running the drivetrain through extended chains to reach the pedals and rigging a steering linkage long enough to control wheels sitting two meters below the handlebars. The engineering problem wasn’t really height, Furze explained, it was getting steering input and pedal power to travel that far down the frame without the whole thing flexing or binding up.

The result looks like a bicycle stretched in a cartoon, but it actually rides. Furze demonstrated it working through the mechanics before taking it into public view, treating the lockdown-era social distancing mandate as a design brief rather than a restriction.

Riding It Through Lockdown Britain

The real test came when Furze took the Highcycle out of the workshop and onto public streets during the UK’s coronavirus lockdown, riding it all the way to a local grocery store. Straight-line riding, he said, was surprisingly easy once he got used to the height. Corners were another matter entirely, with the elevated center of gravity and long steering linkage making tight turns a genuine challenge rather than a stunt-video exaggeration.

Getting on and off posed its own problem. With the saddle two meters up, Furze had to use nearby structures like lampposts and walls to climb up and climb back down, turning every stop into its own small operation.

The Public Reaction

Riding a two-meter-tall bicycle down empty pandemic streets was never going to go unnoticed, and Furze leaned into the spectacle in his video, titled “The Highcycle – Social Distance Bike.”

“Not only am I keeping my social distance, I’m causing a lot of smiles. Everyone’s getting their phones out.”

That reaction fit the moment. Britain, like much of the rest of the world documented in stories about pandemic-era isolation and its odd side effects — from rats swarming empty city streets to public frustration over how the well-off handled the lockdown — was hungry for anything lighthearted. A plumber on a six-and-a-half-foot bike delivered exactly that.

An Eccentric Take on an Uneccentric Rule

Furze framed the whole build as a literal, tongue-in-cheek reading of government guidance rather than a serious transportation proposal, and that’s exactly how it was shared and received on social media. It wasn’t meant to replace the six-foot rule; it was meant to make people laugh at how absurd it looks when you actually try to build the two-meter gap into a piece of hardware.

Furze has never been shy about riding his creations straight into traffic to see what happens, and the Highcycle was no different — he just picked the one moment in modern history when riding something absurd through town also happened to be, technically, following the rules.