Road Cycling in London (and Cycle 2002 Notes)

Tom Ricketts

tom_ricketts@unc.edu

If I were to tell you I had just finished a pleasant cycling experience in Europe, the likely picture to come to mind would be winding through the Loire Valley, a roll through Tuscany, or cresting challenging but short climbs in Provence prior to a pleasant café stop. If I were then to say that it was riding in and around London, the reverie would be broken by a “what? … say that again.” But yup, the riding was part of the ultimate urban cycling experience—pedaling through one of the world’s largest and most congested cities, London. This is something neither to be feared nor avoided, and, if you’re in that town for a business trip and need to get in some miles or training, it’s easier than you think and not at all unpleasant. London gave me a nice, sunny and hard 20 mile training ride in beautiful Richmond Park and a very pleasant 55 mile group ride through the Surry Hills, south of London—but not without some effort and a need to overcome the mental block of “riding in the city.”

I became aware of the growing popularity of cycling in London by reading Cycling Weekly when passing through Gatwick Airport to ride in either France or Mallorca, or when traveling for business. It seemed that London was promoting cycling as a form of SusTrans (sustainable transportation) and the London Cycling Campaign had done wonders in plotting out routes and getting streets marked and educating the public that riding bikes was not a return to pre-war (WWII) ways but a means to getting around a city literally strangling on traffic. I was encouraged to think one could ride safely in London but the back pages of Cycling Weekly featured a string of advertisements for lawyers and insurance companies who would help you when you were injured in a road accident. There were the occasional articles about a tad of road rage here and a tragic encounter with a lorry there, but the overall theme was supportive and I cautiously made the commitment to try and ride out of, if not in, London.

Cycling Weekly includes schedules of training, touring and racing rides throughout Britain, listing temptations like: “Discover Shropshire” (104 kms in the eastern middle part of England) and the Reditch Road and Path Cycling Club ride starting at 9:30 am on Saturday at the Tardebigge Hotel (“30 miles approximately”). I’d seen the magazine when passing through Gatwick earlier in the year and knew that by looking in its extensive “What’s On and Race Reports” section I’d be able to find a ride somewhere in England when I scheduled a business trip to London and Manchester in late September and early October.

The problem was, what about a bike? It’s not that difficult to haul a bike on an international trip; they are allowed, free of charge when you fly outside the US, but I was going to be moving around a little in England and the thought of lugging the bike box and luggage pushed me to looking for a rental possibility. That’s not so easy. But eventually I did find a British web site that listed bike shops that rented: http://www.cycleweb.co.uk and the only place in London that was included was a place called Bikepark. They listed two locations, one in central London and the other in west London, beyond Chelsea, on Kings Road in Fulham. Their web site, http://www.bikepark.co.uk/ , showed them as having two weekend rides, the “every Saturday morning” ride (“Drizzle we ride in—hail and lashing rain we do not”) was advertised as a “brisk training ride” in Richmond Park. The “Surry Hills” Sunday ride was described as 50 miles and 3 hours, “generally longer, harder and more hilly than the ParkRide.” That was the only part of their advertising that was misleading, but that has to do with the definition of “training” and “hills” and I’ll explain later.

The rental information was a little sketchy and I sent an e-mail inquiry to BikePark to get an idea of what was involved. They replied within an hour saying that they rented road bikes, the rental was 40 pounds the first weekend day, 35 pounds the second weekend day and 15 pounds a day afterwards. A pretty stiff rate, but I was bound and determined not to give up the training I’d put in and let a full week go by without some real time in the saddle and went ahead and told them to hold a 55-56 cm bike for me—I’d bring my pedals.

When I made the booking I didn’t think to ask which store I was dealing with, I thought the two would be equivalent and that the likely place for renting road bikes was the west London location since the central store was smack-dab in the heart of London, near Covent Garden, Soho and the British Museum. No way I was going to go into the middle of London and try to ride out to saner roads in the suburbs.

So, when I had lined up meetings in London and other parts of the UK, I packed up my kit, my helmet, and my banana-yellow Look pedals and flew east into the night from Raleigh-Durham airport.

The trip over was the now familiar effort to get sleep between cramped and filling (there are more than two meaning hidden in that phrase) meals, a cycle of movies I hadn’t thought of going to see intermixed with old television shows and the strangely repetitive sounds people make while coping with 8 hours of confinement in a big aluminum tube, 35,000 feet in the air. All of this negative stimulation made it a little hard to adjust to the light in the sky when it ought to be night and the slight detachment of body and mind when trying to fend of the urge to sleep in British mid-afternoon. That was surely just the right time to venture into central London to pick up my rental bike.

I’d gone to the Chelsea (Fulham, really) store and bravely presented myself, ready to rent and ride--my bibs, jersey and shoes in my little back pack. “Nope,” I was told, “we only rent the road bikes in our Holborn store.” I soon learned that the Holborn store was near Covent Garden and I’d have to take the tube—the Underground—to Holborn and walk a bit and pick it up at the central London location. “No problem, mate,” they were expecting me in the heart of London. This made my clever idea of getting a hotel room a block of so away from the Chelsea store and five miles from central London seem a little less than bright, but what the heck, the hotel in Fulham had a room, it had a shower and I was dazedly determined to get a bike to ride. I say determined, more like captured by some cycling Stockholm syndrome that pushed me along in my sleep-deprived state while all reason said: “stupid idea, Tom, look at the traffic!”

Indeed, I looked at the traffic and escaped underground to ride into the heart of the metropolis on the District Line of the London Underground network. I negotiated the way to the bike shop with amazing ease when, by all rights, emerging from the tube station with no idea where east or west was or what time it was in the United Kingdom or the United States, I should have been smacked flat on my face at the first intersection when I stepped into the wrong-way traffic. I only knew that the shop was away from the river and so I walked up the first uphill grade I could find and before too long I found the shop, on an inconspicuous side street not all that far from the Royal Opera House and circled by a series of very busy streets.

The folks at the shop were very matter of fact and accepted without any question that a stranger just off a night-long flight from the US should want to change into a bright blue Lycra® outfit and pedal off for a weekend on one of their Italian-made Battaglin bikes. No problem, I had credit cards with current valid dates. We set about getting pedals screwed on, the seat adjusted (I had my crank-to-midseat height and stem-to-seat length memorized) and they set about changing the stem to accommodate me. A spin on a trainer showed we had it all right and I changed in their toilet and was ready to go. The only thing hanging me up was that I had no idea where I was, where “up” might be and if the Thames ran east to west or just round and round. I said as much to the nice guys at the shop but I must have sounded impressed them by theoretically knowing the difference between a Campy and a Shimano shifter and this made me OK to go. They did, however, swipe my credit card for an 800 pound deposit on the bike, “just in case, mate” At that point, I thought they were going to get a good deal out of this, and all in cash. The guys did help me with a map which I knew would be of little use while I was riding and they gave me directions to get to where I was staying (“just go down toward the river, you know, the Strand, and follow that to Whitehall, you know, ‘round Trafalgar Square, and don’t run the lights near the Houses of Parliament, there’s loads of coppers round there, and then just go on down Kings Road and you’re there.”) They also gave me a set of written directions for the ride on Saturday. “And that would be tomorrow,” I said to myself and rolled out the door.

Instinct led me back downhill and lo and behold there was the Strand, recognizable because of Simpson’s Restaurant (a.k.a. Simpson’s in the Strand, hard by the Savoy) and I knew I was headed to Trafalgar Square and I had a good idea from earlier trips to London that I could make it to Chelsea from there. I noticed that I was moving nicely and that traffic wasn’t threatening and that there was space to the left of the left-hand side motorists. I kept reminding myself of the differences between the bike I was riding and my regular road bike. There were two important things. First, the British put the rear brake on the left hand side of the bar, so the normal preference for stopping should be with the left hand first. Ooops, ther goes the front wheel in a semi-controlled slip. The second was that the Campagnolo system had a little thumb lever to move to the small ring instead of Shimano’s two-part handle system. Ooops, that’s the wrong gear to get moving and, of damn, just pedal.

But I was awake—really wide awake now--and I was alive and I was moving—at times very fast in the traffic. If I wasn’t so dull in the brain, I might have been moved by this series of revelations but I just kept going and made it around a maze of diversions near Westminster just after I passed No. 10 Downing Street on the right. Then I cam up toward the Houses of Parliament on the left then turned right and rounded Westminster Abbey past the new, New Scotland Yard. Normnally I would have gone right past Parliament, but the road was blocked and there was a confusing set of diversions that eventually led me to a dead end of two before instinct got me back toward the river and onto Kings Road. A mile or two later I fetched up on the steps of La Reserve Hotel in Fulham Road which runs roughly parallel to Kings Road away from the river. The desk people didn’t seem to mind my hoisting the bike up the steps and wedging it into the little elevator but the next day the manager helpfully encouraged me to keep it in their storeroom on the first floor.

London Traffic, oops, turn left here…

I had done it. Gotten a bike and ridden it in central London and I was alive! Or, was I? I decided to try the bed and the small room and sleep came like that really big wave that follows a series of small rollers when you’re splashing around in the surf. Whomp-like. No problem oversleeping, I told them at the desk to wake me at 7:30, I had to go for a spin.

They did and I was up and at ‘em, satisfied that the continental breakfast had fruit and bread and juice and only a little disappointed at the lack of the cyclists’ obligatory pre-ride carbo—the banana. What the heck. On my way.

The weather was very un-British for September 28^th, promising sun and temperatures near 70. I was happy in the morning air with arm warmers and short bibs, a little chilled but knowing it was going to be a day when you could work up a sweat. I had a sense of where I was going for the first part, get over to Kings Road and I’d done that the day before, and head west, and by then I knew the sun rose behind me, and go ‘til you get to Putney Bridge. That seemed reasonable, but London is a town with no vistas, no lines of sight down avenues; you’re in a series of tight rounding valleys of three-story buildings with no landmarks on the horizon. Even near the river, which is serpentine, it’s hard to get a sense of place. But the land that gave us Shakespeare also gave us road signs that point toward things like bridges and parks. I made it to Putney Bridge with no real confusion and across the river. I found myself following a fellow on a new Trek carbon US Postal bike wearing a top-of-the-line Assos kit. He was pushing pretty hard and I was able to catch him at the light across the bridge but he pulled away and it took an effort to catch up. When I did we were rolling down the road toward Richmond. “Does this lead to Roehampton Gate?” I asked when I pulled up next to him on a longish straight. He seemed to be a little confused by the question and replied, “I think it’s up here, off to the left.” “I guess I’ll find it,” I said, a little heartened that I hadn’t appeared to have said something in Martian. “Are you meeting someone?” he asked back. “Yes, I’m trying to get to the BikePark ride.” “Oh, yes, that’s where I’m going,” and he accelerated to his former just-under-race pace and I followed, choking out “Carry on, I’ll just take your wheel,” as I pushed hard. “He must be late,” I thought. We weren’t, he was just warming up.

The ride started at Roehampton Gate, the easternmost entrance to Richmond Park. There were 15 or so riders standing by the gate house when I arrived and the number swelled to nearly 25 in a few minutes. I noticed the guy on the Trek who pulled me into the park had a “L’Etape du Tour” bottle. “Did you do L’Etape?” I asked and he nodded and the woman next to him said “I did too and so did he,” motioning to the rider next to her, a fellow on a Colnago in US Postal kit. It turned out that she and a group of other regular BikePark riders did L’Etape. The Trek-bike fellow beat my time by an hour or two and the woman, Katrine, and her friends, Fraser and Mark (we were now on first name basis) did it in about 9 hours. “Well, at least I might be able to do today’s ride without being last,” I thought when I tried to impress Katrine by saying I did it in around 8 hours. Another wrong perception.

Katrine and Mark were Americans working in London, like perhaps a fourth of the riders in the group. It seems that there’s a pretty strong group of cyclists from the US in London and this ride was one where they got together.

There were four or five guys in BikePark gear, an unlovely green with black and white lettering. I learned early in my brief cycling career that the good riders don’t make it on fashion, this proved no exception. The ride leader—rather the one person who chose to speak up—gave the general directions. Three times ‘round the park, keep to the left, a fast-ish group (if you want to work up a sweat) would run off earlier and slower groups, maybe three in all, would follow, and if you don’t feel up to it today, just drop off and join the slower groups. No one moved. Then someone said, “I’ll go off with a medium fast.” Which caused me to ask the fellow next to me what “medium fast” was. He said 20-21 mph, and that sounded nice, the park looked a little toward the flat side and, what the heck, I could drop back. More misconceptions.

The circuit was a little better than 6 miles around and the morning mist hid the dip then rise on the other side of a low hill to the south on the opening leg. We got off to a rolling start that quickly moved toward a 23 mph rate then up a 3% grade for 400 meters at a rising race pace and if you were wearing a heart rate monitor, you had to turn the beeper down because it’s going to start telling you you’ve hit max real quick. These folks were serious and they got into a rolling pace line in 800 meters and didn’t like to pause, even on the sharp corner going left at the southern gate a mile into the ride.

I was getting a dose of lung-scorch when, all of a sudden, I see this giant stag-deer just to the right of the road, a huge rack of antlers on his head. “Come on, Tom, hallucinations start after 40 minutes, calm down,” I counsel myself before I realize that this is Richmond DEER Park and yes, the Queen’s stags are lounging about, oblivious to the whizzing cyclists headed past.

I’m still there, in the pack, and getting used to the pace and the boys are chatting and pushing pedals and the Bikepark guy is shouting to keep people pulling through. “Pretty tough ride,” I allow myself a reflection as I gear up and down to meet the pace. Then another hard left and quickly the road pitches up to a 6-8% and I’m toast, dark and smoking, and like so many times before, my pedaling rate drops and all becomes quiet and I can see the trees and the deer--but not the other riders and before too long I can tug my bone-dry tongue back in my mouth and start the internal inquest: “yeah, but these guys race seriously… and did you see that guy with the Litespeed Vortex, he was good,” and the all-purpose justification for the unexpected solo ride, “they must be in their 30s--20s even.”

I finish the first lap and keep pulling myself, moving ahead of some grupettos of two and three and then the “medium-slow” group catches me, but no problem, I can hop on and take my pulls and do so, but just after the biggest of the big stags looks me in the eye just off the right shoulder of the road, damn , that same hill. I’m trying to spin but they drop me again, except this time I can see them slowly roll away with their happy drafting as I labor 100 meters back. That turned to 300 meters by the time they go left just inside Roehampton Gate for the final lap. I grabbed onto a pair of guys who seemed to also be in the ride and they manage to keep up a conversation while I concentrate on keeping close and making my throat bigger in order to get more air in my lungs. A couple of chugs up the little rises and it’s over. An hour of “brisk training” has made me appreciate that these urban cyclists can turn a crank.

Katrine and some of her friends invite me to take a cool-down lap through the middle of the park which is lovely and worth a visit just to walk around. There’s a nice knobby-tire bike path around the outside and plenty of space to be on your own, even on this early autumn day with lots of unusual sun. Two American fellows lead me back into town, this time taking Hammersmith Bridge, which is further down river than Putney Bridge. It’s busy as the day moves toward noon. It turns out one of the guys is taking this route to avoid the Chelsea-West Ham Football (Soccer) match. Damn, My hotel is 50 meters from the Stadium and I want to go there, not avoid it. But I get to see another route into town on a bicycle and, as we roll down Earl’s Court Road, I go past Redcliffe Square where I lived when I stayed in London for a few months back in 1971.

A good day and a good ride. But how do you get to Hampton Court for tomorrow’s ride? It seemed to be just a smudge on the little map I printed off from the BikePark web site. Hampton Court is one of the premier tourist sites around London and I’m sure there will be signs. There were, and the trip out for the 10 miles between my hotel and the start of the ride was no real problem.

The next morning I retrace my way to, then through, Richmond Park, but backwards from the ride route in the Park, down yesterday’s damned double-humped killer of cycling ambition, which, when you ride it at a nice pace seems like a little bump on a pleasant ride. The golfers were out and it was hazy in the park, my glasses fogged a little, but all was right in England this dewy morn.

I turned out of the park into the suburban maze that leads to another river crossing. I bumbled about getting into Kingston, a nice, riverside town with a traffic problem but a scenic bridge over the Thames. At this point, the river is getting narrow and more recreational. On past the long straight walls of Hampton Court Palace Ground and, look! there’s a dead fox in the road, maybe the P. of Wales ran it down and the dogs couldn’t decide who would do it in and the caring Prince tossed the little fellow over the fence. His “squashed-flat” look made Mr. Fox more likely a road accident, but nevertheless this was a harbinger of the fabled English countryside. Hampton Court Bridge was hard by the main entrance to Hampton Court Palace, looking low and benign on this nice morning. There were few people about at this early Sunday hour and I thought about taking a spin on the grounds since the gates were open and the entry road was paved. But I carried on across the bridge, not wanting to miss the ride and soon spotted a clutch of people in “civilian clothes” on the right, unloading bikes onto a short side street.

“BikePark ride?” I tried to sound inquiring, not sure what to say when approaching people in normal leisure gear when you’re strapped in bright red spandex. “Right,” came the reply, “we start at that square thing on the bridge, we meet there, I’ll be over in a jif.” The “square thing” was a low-turret of the bridge and it soon attracted 10 people with bikes, good bikes and the people looked fit and ready to ride.

We set off from the bridge getting into thickening traffic but soon start rolling through the suburbs making quick rights and lefts but the general direction was south as advertised. Then a sharp right past a pub and we were in one of those hedge-lined, winding lanes that say: “Rural England!” but mean fast-approaching, small deadly cars that appear without notice. Happily, there were few motorized demons about and they were well mannered when encountered. The group was alert and ready to call out “car back” or “car up” or “Oh shit! That was some pothole” whenever necessary. The pace was 18-19 on the flats, robust but not anaerobic.

Ranmore West hill was the first challenge, but I cheated on it as one of the guys had a flat and while most of the group waited, slurping Lucozade—the local Gatorade, I crossed the busy road and took the 6-ish percent three-quarters mile long hill at a steady pace and stopped and ate a banana at the top, finishing my snack just as the pack arrived.

The descent was said to be dangerous by Paul, the ride leader, and he was right about two turns, the first came up quickly and we were ready for it. The second came toward the bottom and made me brake a little too precipitously, forgetting the left-rear rule on the bike, but the slip was minimal and I had traction around the corner and soon we were stopped at another main road at the bottom.

Then we were running through little towns with Anglo-Saxon names that were derived from the all-purpose English Ur-words: “clump” and “thud.”

Leith Hill was short with interruptions in and out of shade, but I was back at the tail as we regrouped on the top and turned to go downhill. We were soon back to a main road then off, across traffic, past a rally of a hundred or so motorcyclists to the little lane that led up to Box Hill. This was a taste of Continental Europe with two bona fide switch backs and some long, steady climbing, maybe a mile and a half in total. I bravely pushed past the two women on the ride and the young American guy and steadied my pace and got a good breathing rhythm which must have seemed a bit too slow for Katrine and Rebecca, as first the one, and then the other paced back past me. The young guy from Texas wasn’t able to get back and I had the pleasure of arriving well before he and several other folks on the ride struggled up to the snack bar and interpretive center at the top of the hill. The bulk of the group had already been through the line at the snack bar and were munching away on their cakes, so my triumph was decidedly relative.

As we left the peak on Box Hill, the view opened up on the right and there was a beautiful view of rural Surrey as far as the eye could see. “Worth a visit in a slow automobile,” I thought, as we rolled on to the up and mostly down descent back toward London. This was quick and interrupted by some rather hairy and fast negotiation of some major round-abouts at speed with lots of traffic. It seemed natural to the group and Paul and the other ride leader took no heed of doing the full circle in the round abouts to go back and pull up the two guys who were suffering off the back. There was the obligatory semi-sprint toward the end of the ride through the residential road leading toward Hampton Court Bridge and, again, like other first ride, it was over before I knew what it was all about. 55 miles of pleasant but active riding with a good group on good roads where you needed to be alert but not unduly so.

Road riding in and around London is eminently do-able and can be quite pleasant and challenging. As you move around the city you see many more than the usual number of cyclists you would see in a big US city. Rush hours brings a steady flow of commuters on road, street and mountain bikes, some in suits, some in full cycle gear with packs no doubt holding their office wear.

Bring a bike if you want, but there are shops that rent “comfort” are city bikes and there is likely a chance that other shops might rent road (racing) bikes.

Cycle 2002. It just so happened that on the weekend I was doing all this riding these was a cycling trade show going on in London. This was Cycle 2002 held at the Business Design Center in Islington, a bit north of the center of London. The show was very nicely done with many of the major manufacturers and a lot of smaller companies on hand. One of Mario Cippolini’s bikes was on display at the Specialized display and Robbie McEwan’s Litepeed Ultimate was set up at the American Bicycle Group’s offerings. There were spinning classes going on (sign up to sweat) and some interactive video systems where you pedaled in front of a big screen that showed a virtual ride and read-outs of your power and speed. There were some very interesting concepts on display, like wooden bikes and strangely constructed folding bikes. You can see some of the pictures of these on the cycling news web site (www.cyclingnews.com/tech/2002/tradeshows02/?id=photos#cycle), like this wooden bike…

Photo ©: Mark Sharon/marquev@clara.net

The British have several major cycling magazines: Cycling Plus, Cycle Sport, Pro Cycling and Cycling Weekly. The last touts itself as Britain’s biggest selling magazine and it had a pretty complete schedule of events, rides and cycle events as well as comprehensive coverage of major international road, track, mountain and cyclocross events. Cycling Plus and Cycling Weekly also tend to have more objective gear and bike reviews. The bigger monthlies are available in the US without much trouble and Cycle Plus and Cycling Weekly have appeared in the big-box book stores (Borders, Barnes & Noble) in some markets.