Thames Crossings 12: Battersea Bridge

Downriver from Wandsworth Bridge is Battersea Bridge, London's narrowest at 40 feet wide. Opened in 1890, it's another Bazalgette design. It replaced a structure painted by Turner and Whistler. They were impressionists, so we have no idea what the old bridge looked like, but we know how it felt.

The late Victorians generally get a bad press, being portrayed as a bunch of misogynist empire-grabbers who sent kids up chimneys, covered up table legs, and wrote terrible popular songs. But - and here I'm with otherwise ludicrous buffoon Jeremy Clarkson - they brought an engineering vision and passion to serve all society. Not just the rich educated white middle class, but all educated white middle class.


Battersea Bridge for example may be an overengineered, clunky thing bristling with lampposts and fussy faux-gold designs, but it's lasted, it's reasonably handsome, and it's a whole lot more characterful than the 20th-century concrete yawns of Twickenham or London Bridge, say.

The greatest achievement of British Victorians was of course the standard diamond bike frame with pneumatic tyres, which dates from exactly the same period as the bridge – the late 1880s – and is similarly unchanged, sturdy and reliable. So I can forgive them their rambling piano concertos and absurd facial hair.

On the north side you can cycle along the embankment promenade the couple of hundred yards to the spidery ironwork of Albert Bridge. On the south side you have to take a road away from the riverside.

Comedy Cycle Lanes 1: Nine Elms Lane

This is the first in a series about bad bike facilities. (For the mathematicians among you, the series is infinite, irrational, and monotonic increasing.)

First up is one of the crown jewels of crap cycle paths: the one along Nine Elms Lane in south London, between Queenstown Road and Vauxhall. Here's a Google map:


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I've been past it several times, and greeted it like an old friend yesterday when I went into Clapham to have my teeth re-grouted.

Well, not so much an old friend, more like a vengeful and ugly ex-partner from a messy divorce.

Anyway, the path starts just by Battersea Dogs and Cats Home, where stray or unwanted apostrophes are taken in and cared for. Here is where you can join the path. Except that you can't, because they fence it off from the road by these toothpaste-coloured blocks.
If you get as far as rappeling the blocks to get on to the path, then once you've abseiled down the pavement, you can practise your slalom skills.
A bad bike path is a bit like those hitherto unseen characters that join the Star Trek party, beaming down to a dangerous planet populated by bad actors: you just know it's only a matter of seconds before they disappear horribly. Sure enough, the Nine Elms path expires here, only to rematerialise after the bus shelter. (All cyclists, of course, simply ignore the path and opt to follow the road.)
Finally, just by the turn-off to the fruit and veg volcano of New Covent Garden market, comes your comic highlight: the cycle path completely blocked in the space of ten metres by an electricity box, a street light pole, and - boom, tiss! - the sign for the cycle path.

To be fair, the same bike path is also blocked by the sign for the bike path at several other points on the bike path, and on the one that runs along the opposite side of the road.

Do you know of more LOL bike facility incompetence? Other chortle-making cycle-path cluelessness? Or perhaps you're a publisher who wants to push a book called Crap Cycle Lanes, which I distinctly recall was actually my suggestion? Let me know...