Thinking about a week in France – probably a week wandering around Brittany, centred on Carnac, so poking around the SCNF website. How refreshing it is that every train on which cycles can be taken has a little logo beside it. I haven’t explored further to see about bookings and things, but surely this is a sign of serious attempts to make combining train and cycle journeys possible and even pleasant – so unlike the attitude of British train companies.
Tempted by a map I found in Stanfords, of the Garden of England Cycle Route , yesterday I set out from my front door in Regent’s Park to tackle the first bit. I was hoping for Rochester, about 50 miles, but didn’t get quite that far, due to a combination of late starting, slow going (cobblestones and blind corners on the Greenwich to Woolwich section), and threatening weather.
Still, it was an interesting ride, and flat: always a bonus.
The route to Greenwich, about 12 miles, is familiar, but after that it was new territory. I expected post-industrial ruin, and there was plenty of that – great timbered wharfs melting gently into the Thames, and also of course the post-post-modern of the Millennium Dome, which appears to be rusting gently into its carparks. (Great cycle path around it though!)
A little further downriver there was this stunningly detailed Victorian(?) warehouse complex – just look at the fancy coloured brickwork. Parts of it appear to have been used as an industrial museum, but it looked in a pretty bad way.
… with the Lambeth Cycling Campaign yesterday, otherwise known as “Benny’s Summer Spectacular”. (Thanks Benny!)
Hastings is that classic grand old lady down on her luck. There’s enough historic, impressive architecture here to really rival Brighton, but although it seems a bit improved from when I was here last, there is still a very long way to go.
At the railway station is a grand new entrance, all curtained glass walls – you don’t need a photo, you know the score, a square lump that bears no relationship at all to its surroundings. Someone commented however that with new environmental standards such architecture will disappear quickly; it will probably very quickly look as dated and anachronistic as the tall Fifties office block opposite, which appeared to be at least part abandoned.
Next up we passed through another new development – a shopping centre. I suppose, as these go, with it built around a modern square that at least provides air and sunlight, this isn’t as bad as it might be. Appropriate really since as the statue attests, this was built on the old cricket ground. (Hardly the same level of activity among users, however.) And Benny pointed to the horrible proportions of the circular towers at each end – I suppose it is an attempt to refer to the Norman castle on the hill just above, but not a particularly successful one. And you have to wonder why new shops were needed, rather than redeveloping old buildings along the front.
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No, not something that, as a cyclist, I write very often, but this morning when 36 cyclists arrived at Charing Cross Station for an architectural tour that was starting from Hastings, Southeastern Trains (albeit after a bit of throwing a tizz and having to be persuaded), sensibly ensured space on the train by devoting one of the first-class carriages, which would on a Saturday have been empty anyway, to housing the bicycles. So they went first-class and we second, but it was a perfectly sensibly arrangement.
More on the tour tomorrow…
Cycling back this evening from the Battersea Arts Centre (which really is a long, long way from anywhere, although I admit that going via Stockwell and Clapham Common on the way out wasn’t exactly ideal – I was trying to hug the river but Vauxhall Cross put paid to that theory) I found possibly London’s most token cycle path – along Nine Elms Lane (a piece of urban racetrack through an industrial estate that in no way lives up to its name.
From the south it starts as a wide footpath beside the road marked as dual use, the cycle part divided off by a white line. There are large numbers of street light posts and other signposts in the way, but never mind – the white line just swerves out around them, and there is a white curve painted around the post to indicate that you aren’t supposed to cycle through it. You really wouldn’t want to be checking something over your shoulder at the wrong moment – you’d easily run head on into a post.
Later, it turns into a rather narrower than normal width footpath just marked as dual use. At 11pm not too bad, but it must be pretty hazardous in peak hours.
Still, you hit the embankment cycle route after that, Big Ben is in view; you’re back in civilisation – ahh. On a glorious summer evening, from then on its was indeed a fine way to travel a fine city.
It is possible I may be becoming too much of a central Londonite …
While I’m on the subject of cycling, it seems appropriate to note the sad death of a cyclist on last weekend’s Dunwich Dynamo.
Regular readers may have noted that talk of my doing it this year evaporated. The sternum took a long time to recover from the Hadrian’s Wall tumble, and having just started a new job and wiith lots else on commonsense (and lack of training) struck this year. But I really plan to do it next year…
Don’t drive into central London. Just don’t do it. Cycling through Soho this evening I was asked three! times by bewildered foreigners how to get to places that were utterly impossible to describe, given one-way streets and all. And in weaving all over the road and dithering you’re a danger to yourself and everyone else. Catch the bus, or Tube. It is what locals with any sense do.
And note to myself: don’t come back from South London over the Waterloo Bridge at night, even if the alternative is the deadly bicycle lane on Blackfriars Bridge. (Remember when Ken was going to fix that?) Pedestrians in Soho seem to lose whatever little brains they started with after the light goes.
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