With entrants on penny farthings, hobby horses, bone shakers, this was British eccentricity at its best? In pictures: Knutsford's penny farthing race Cycling's answer to the Goodwood Festival of Speed was held in a small, quiet town south of Manchester on Sunday.

Use of terms like smart cities to describe technological fixes for urban areas only shows the narrowness of UK thinking on cities and sustainability (Smarter cities, Society, 8 September). The smart growth movement has been well-established in North America and elsewhere for the last 15-20 years and has shown that towns and cities are the future for most of us. But the challenges and sustainability they offer lie in much wider spatial, transport and community planning innovations.