Cycle clip: Bike racks on a fast ferry

Some of London's most thrillingly situated bike racks are here, on the Thames Clippers fast ferries. They're commuter services, but take bikes (though we've never seen any, apart from ours).

For sightseers, the £12 rover tickets give you unlimited travel on the Clippers all day after 10am, from O2 in the east to Millbank in the west.

Both the O2 and Tate Britain have some of the free ping pong tables set around London this summer - they'll be taken down after this weekend, so hurry.)

Talking of hurrying, the best bits are east of Tower Bridge, where the boat bombs along like Donald Campbell in Bluebird just before closing time. If you do put your bike in the racks, it might be an idea to lock them, just in case.

Ferry 'cross the Mersea

We're big fans of little ferries that take bikes; the Thames has a few out west (at Twickenham and Shepperton, for example).

But we were pleased to discover this one that runs between Mersea Island and Brightlingsea. It's not far from Colchester, but a long way from spray-tans and white stilettos, in Essex's marshy southern flatlands.

Mersea Island itself - pronounced 'Mersey', though this ferry was never celebrated by a 1960s pop combo with an irritatingly overplayed song - has interesting bustling-harboury stuff to the west, seafood stalls and all.


Finding the ferry, which runs from the easternmost point of the island, is quite an adventure, and involves asking locals for directions down unmarked tracks and across unsigned shingle beaches. Luckily we speak a related language and could make ourselves understood.

It runs a scheduled service until 5 September (11am, 1.30pm, 4pm from Brightlingsea, returning 15 mins later from Mersea), and also runs on demand in this period with a phone call (07981 450169). It then runs until 31 October by phone appointment (01206 302200). Fares are a couple of quid plus a quid for a bike - for which price you can also get yourself a credit-crunch special fish and chips from the cafe in Brightlingsea.


From Brightlingsea to Colchester you can go largely along the river, through pleasant places such as Wivenhoe (right). With its wide traffic-free riverside path, nautical feel, and trim wooden-board houses, at times it feels like a smart suburb of Copenhagen. Then you get to Colchester.

'Man forced to cycle onto ferry'

A London businessman suffered a terrible indignity while dodging the Ash Cloud Crisis this weekend, reports the BBC: he had to buy a woman's bike to cycle on to a ferry with.

I've always rather enjoyed cycling on to and off of ferries. There's a chapter about it in my 50 Quirky Bike Rides book.

And we can report that the Isle of Man ferry, contrary to the cycling enforcers of Norfolkline in the news story, insists that you dismount and walk your bike en route to or from Douglas (right).

But then, on the Isle of Man, it was probably an offence until recently for men to ride women's bikes, until those meddling EU bureaucrats forced them to harmonise.

Sign up for putting mileages on signs

One of the things I love about cycling in the Netherlands is the signs. They don't just tell you how far it is to the next pancake shop, they give you much more: Alkmaar 4,2km Amsterdam 38km Deutschland 193km Kowloon 13328km Proxima Centauri 3.9 x 10^13km and so on. They're signs full of excitement and possibilities. By bike, anything is possible, they seem to say.

Not so much in England - in general, bike signs don't even bother to give you distances at all. I got into a disagreement with the Cycle Superhighways Tsarina the other evening at the City Cycling Forum because she told me they're probably not going to put distances on the signage for the Superhighways. Why not? Because some people might be confused by them. Well, I said, some people are confused by anything you can't vote for by telephone on a Saturday night, but that doesn't mean we should dumb every damn thing down to what marketing Barbies can understand. Which shows why I should never go into politics, TV, marketing, or probably any sort of paid employment.


So I was pleased to see this sign in Hull on yet another of my recent trips there. The National Cycle Route fishtail sign here (above right and right) is right in front of one of the few central Hull buildings not to have been relaunched by the Luftwaffe as a pile of rubble. It proudly encourages you to cycle to ROTTERDAM 231m ZEEBRUGGE 235m. And all but five of the miles the signposts tell you about are actually done by the North Sea Ferry, an easy flat cycle path up the road, while you sleep. I like that kind of cycling.

Thames Crossings home page up

I've put up a home page for the Thames Crossings series that's just finished on this blog on the website for my book, www.bike99.com.

The home page summarises all 33 ways you can cross the tidal Thames with a bike, from Teddington to Tilbury via central London - a fabulous little two-day trip of 20 miles/four hours' leisurely cycling each day.

There's also a Google map to help place them all.

Thames Crossings 33: Tilbury-Gravesend Ferry

Downriver from the Dartford Crossing is the final traverse of the Thames before the sea: the Tilbury-Gravesend Ferry. It runs every half hour. Singles are £2.70, returns £4.10, and bikes go free.

Getting here is a bit of a journey, but you have a choice of banks. On the south bank you can follow National Cycle Route 1 from Woolwich via Dartford (report). On the north side a good new traffic-free path follows the north side of the Thames; it was opened early this year, and runs from Rainham in Essex to Tilbury. (Roadside cycle paths lead from Woolwich to Rainham alongside the A13; see report on the 30-mile route from Woolwich to Tilbury.)

Thames Crossings 29: Woolwich Ferry

Downriver from Greenwich Foot Tunnel is Woolwich Ferry. And there's no charge for using it. So there really is such a thing as a free launch.

The ferry (two boats on weekdays, one at weekends) runs every ten minutes (15 minutes at weekends) from 6am to 8pm. Outside these times you'll have to use the tunnel a few yards downstream.

The ferry is a proper, chunky affair, built for 500 passengers and 200 tonnes of vehicles. Or, if they ever build the Thames Gateway Bridge and so flog the boats off to ply some churning third-world straits, 2,500 passengers and 600 tonnes of vehicles.


In one form or another the service has been going since 1889. It’s free because it’s the aquatic link from the North Circular to the South Circular, and its short approach roads carry regular queues of cars, lorries with CLEAN ME fingered in the grime on the back, and the odd bus. (Any other British bus routes involve ferries? Discuss.)

On a bike you can head straight up to the front of the road queue and be first on the car deck when they let you on. If you wheel your bike along the footpath they’ll let you on the ferry with the passengers, but you’ll have to schlepp it up and down some stairs; the road approach is better, and the car deck has better views.

It may not be San Francisco or Hong Kong, but it's got a grimy charm and you can see the Dome's sleeping hedgehog, Canary Wharf's inscrutable towers, and the Thames Barrier's alien landing-craft upstream. And it's free, so ha! Take that, Sausalito Ferry ($7.45)! Take that, Star Ferry (HK$6 plus HK$18 for bike)!

As the boat pulls away from the jetty, there’s a safety announcement telling you what to do in case of an emergency on the five-minute crossing. Seasickness is unlikely to be a problem.


If you get time to go downstairs, you’ll find it looks much like a ferry down there: a maze of metal doors and portals to empty rooms marked No Entry, boxes of mystery equipment for survival adrift, and framed lists of regulations in microscopic 1960s type. And no, there's no bar or buffet.

Should you be taking advantage of the freeness by doing a return trip immediately, you’ll be asked to go off and come on again.

From here it's only a few yards to Woolwich Foot Tunnel.

Thames Crossings 27: Hilton Docklands-Canary Wharf Ferry

Downriver from Rotherhithe Tunnel is the Hilton Docklands-Canary Wharf Ferry. The small boat shuttles between Canary Wharf Pier on the north side and Nelson Dock Pier (right), which leads you through Hilton Hotel reception, on the south.

You can take your bike on this commuter service, which costs either £3 or £5 per crossing, depending on whether you believe the photocopied timetables at the hotel or the signboard at Canary Wharf, and runs all day every day, every few minutes at rush hours, less regularly off-peak.


There are several of these commuter ferry services, operated by Thames Clippers. They can take you and bike across the Thames, between the piers of say Tower Bridge's north bank and London Bridge's south bank.

But they don't really count as 'Thames Crossings' any more than taking your bike on an overground train service would. The Hilton-Canary Wharf service is the only water service that explicitly traverses the Thames between facing piers, and the boats clearly say FERRY on the side, so it's a legitimate crossing for our purposes.


Personally I'd miss it out as it costs five quid that could be spent on a perfectly good packet of crisps or glass of coke in a Docklands bar, but here it is listed for completeness.

On Westferry Circus, the roundabout just behind the Canary Wharf Pier, is the Traffic Light Tree. The artwork, from 1998 by Pierre Vivant, is presumably a metaphor for every financial expert around here. It's financed by the taxpayer, does what it likes, and sends out mixed signals.

From here on, either north or south bank, it's streets roughly paralleling the riverside, or the promenade itself, to Greenwich. A Google map shows both routes between Tower Bridge and Greenwich. Either way it's about two miles to Greenwich Foot Tunnel.

Thames Crossings 1: Ham Ferry

Downriver from Teddington Footbridge, the first cycle crossing of the Thames is Hammertons (or Ham) Ferry, which connects Marble Hill Park and Ham House. It's a tiny, on-demand shuttle boat that runs February-October, 10am-6pm.

It costs £1 per adult plus 50p per bike. That works out as something like £30 per mile, which is more expensive than the Orient Express, so go on and treat yourself.


You ride a bit of history here as you cross to the north bank. Hammertons Ferry was set up as a rival to the nearby Twickenham Ferry in 1908. A legal battle established the right of Hammertons Ferry to operate (more detail in the comments below).

Its victory was celebrated in a song that was published called 'Ferry to fairyland', which seems to us a rather ambitious description of Marble Hill. Still, the Twickenham Ferry's chief claim to fame hitherto seems to have been a tedious mention in Dickens's Little Dorrit, which clearly couldn't compete with a comic music-hall ditty.

Continue a mile or so past all the smart moored boats along the towpath on the north bank to Richmond Bridge.