More confusing signs on Vauxhall roundabout

As previously reported, cycling round Vauxhall roundabout (right) is confusing enough. The cycle lane merry-go-round is interrupted constantly by give-ways and red lights, and inconsiderate parkers.



Even more confusing is if you want to know the name of the street...

How much respect for bike lanes? Vauxhall

The 'cycle lane' that runs - well, limps, more like - round Vauxhall roundabout is an obstacle course enough. You have to give way every five seconds to side roads, wait at a dozen lights, and often dismount and push.

But this morning it was even more of a challenge. First, because of the sign (right) helpfully advising cyclists that they have to move to the side, to avoid the sign advising them to move to the side.


Second, because of the van (right) delivering tiles.

Well, that's appropriate: Vauxhall roundabout is enough to make anyone's eyes glaze over.


And yet again, the number plate...

Thames Crossings 15: Vauxhall Bridge

Downriver from Chelsea Bridge is the 1906 steel-arch structure of Vauxhall Bridge. Cross over the wide, fast cement savannah and you might think it's central London's most boring crossing.


But of course you're on a bike, not in a car or on a bus, so you can stop to look over the side. If you do, you'll see all sorts of quirky stuff.

And we don't just mean the Pink Floyd view of Battersea Power Station's dead sheep to the west, Tate Britain on the north bank, the Eye and other postcard-London goodies downriver, or the Stalinist-cake architecture of the SIS (aka MI5, MI6) building at the south end (right).

No. We're talking about the eight large female figures depicting the arts and sciences that adorn the upstream and downstream sides of the bridge. They're all flowing art-nouveauish graces that could be advertising a safety bicycle in a 1900s-Paris poster by Mucha.


One, for example, holds a palette and a little sculpture of a person (above right, who may be holding an even littler sculpture of a person, etc, in a Borges-style recursion).

But the best one is Miss Architecture 1906, who holds a model of St Paul's Cathedral (right). There must be some sort of pub-quiz-question you can ask here, such as, 'From which bridge can you photograph both the MI6 building and St Paul's Cathedral?', or, 'Why are you arresting me, officer?'.

From here it's busy dual-carriageway Millbank (past Tate Britain) on the north side, or a riverside promenade (past the SIS building, from where security monkeys will have binoculars trained on you) on the south side; access it via the upriver side of the bridge. Now we're getting into serious tourist-view territory. Lambeth Bridge is about half a mile away.

The Vauxhall effect: Park rubbish here

Spotted this in the railway-arch bike parking underneath Vauxhall Station this morning (on a research trip, to be written up in detail shortly): a Sheffield rack cheerily commandeered for use as bin park.

We've seen bike racks used for all sorts of things - lockups for ladders, dog-parks, impromptu gym equipment for children - and I think my bike's a bit rubbish, but this is ridiculous.

Clearly there's something about 'Vauxhall' that gives people misleading ideas. Visitors to Soviet-sphere countries are often amused to find that the name has been appropriated to mean 'central station'.

Georgia's railway hub in Tbilisi, for example, is called Voksal. It gave me a shiver of homesickness when I was there a couple of years ago. Almost as much as glimpsing a signpost in North Carolina to a place called Macclesfield.

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:


View Larger Map

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...