BBC article on cycling accidents

Did you even bother to try to read any of the articles on that site? The page hasn't been updated for 5 years and most of the links are broken.

No - I did not see that there would be any value in me trawling through the source data to make my own conclusions, and was prepared to just read the conclusions/summaries on the website page i linked to. Have no reason to assume that they are in any way misrepresenting any of the original reports, but obviously cannot prove this.

The higher incidence of female cyclists dying under lorries in London has been discussed for years - here's one of the earlier papers that makes the link:

http://www.bmj.com/cgi/content/full/308/6943/1534

Thanks I had not seen that. a lot of the discussion on the thread has been around whether or not hypothesis implied by bbc is borne out by the data given the sample size. the truth would be better represented by studies of data over a greater time period, including this paper (and presumably data has continued to be collected since this paper).

As to your claim that there should be no reason why such a trend would be specific to London, I can only assume that this is because it 'stands to reason'?

Yes i am making this assumption myself, and of course could be wrong, apologies if it is ignorant.