Bike-part streets 7 of 10: Panyer Alley

Where is it?
Nestling behind St Paul's Cathedral, and curiously invisible to my 2003 London A to Z.

What’s it like?
A small, busy pedestrian area serving as foot access for Paternoster Square and the north side of St Paul's.


Why bike there?
You'll have to dismount of course, but you can trundle round into Paternoster Square to see the handsome old Temple Bar, moved brick-by-brick here from Fleet St via a garden in Hertfordshire. There's some bike parking here if you fancy a look round St Paul's itself, but it's a whopping £12.50 to get in. That would get you a large carafe of wine in Tate Modern's top-floor bar just a short push over Millennium Bridge, with its fabulous evening views of the river skyline.

Is it a good place to have panniers, however spelt?
Panniers are always better than rucksacks, unless you're genuinely mountain biking, which is unlikely in EC1. A rucksack will just about hold a Mars bar and clean T-shirt. Panniers will hold lunch, dinner, breakfast, maps, your A to Z, a few humorous travelogues to read while waiting for the train, emergency chocolate, a bottle of Chilean cab sauv, a set of spanners, a laptop, a camera, a phone, a hard disc sound recorder, chargers, batteries, a survival blanket, an extra fleece, waterproof trousers, waterproof jacket, one-pound plastic bowlful of bananas, Swiss Army knife and an Argos catalogue. As I have, in fact, just discovered.