Worrying signs

I was struck by the shape of this cycle sign painted in the road in front of the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, the other day. It looks rather Brompton-shaped to me; well, we are in central London's folding-bike heartland.


At least the sign above has the right number of wheels. Perhaps this one, outside Queenstown Road station in Battersea, is mkaing the point that you have to lock both wheels to the frame or rack, or else somebody will nick one of them.

London to Cambridgeshire and back in two pints

One of the great pleasures of London cycling is exploring those quirky places which, for reasons lost in the peasouper of time, have something of the bizarre or paradoxical about them. Savoy Court, for example, where you have to cycle on the right, Continent-style; mystery streets with no buildings; cycle lanes that disappear under parked cars.

Last night we explored another psychogeography curio: a little bit of Cambridgeshire in the heart of London. I'm fascinated by enclaves - Gibraltar, that bit of Russia round Kaliningrad, the Old Soke of Peterborough.

And Ely Place (top right), parallel to Hatton Garden off Holborn, is just such an enclave, technically part of the Diocese of Ely.

Down Ely Court, a narrow alley connecting Ely Place with Hatton Garden, is the Mitre Inn (bottom right), which until the 1970s had its licence issued from Cambridge, and even today is listed in my drinking partner's Cambridgeshire Good Beer Guide.


So, of course, the evening was lubricated by witty aperçus about this administrative anomaly.

There was no cycle parking in Hatton Garden by the alley to the pub (right), so we had to go all the way to Cambridgeshire, to the stands in Ely Place.

We only needed one lock there, this being the provinces.

The high level of cycling, typical of Cambridge, was noticeable.

On a fine day they say you can see London from here.

The Mitre had some excellent beers, but I was disappointed to see London ales instead of local brews such as Milton.

Still, the conversation had that Cantabrigian cultural touch.

You get the idea.


The Mitre dates back to 1547 and is a fabulous little place, oak-panelled, quaint, and full of legal types in suits enjoying a quick pint en route home. It's really worth the journey out of London.

And the pub is Brompton country. I saw two discreetly folded up and stowed inside, one of them owned by an affable chap who turned out to be a judge. If I ever do act on any of my taxi-revenge fantasies, I hope I come up before him - he clearly understands. Luckily, though, my trip had relaxed me; must be that countryside air.

Quirky stuff on maps - 1

I spend a lot of time looking at maps while cycling, usually trying to find out where I've gone wrong. I don't need a satnav to take me the wrong way down a one-way lane and across a stream with no bridge; I can do that myself with an OS map.

And when I notice quirky stuff, I always want to cycle there. Maybe it's a place with a funny name like Wetwang. Or a strange geological phenomenon like the sandy tendril of Spurn Point four miles out at sea. Or the fact that the (arbitrary and much hated) county of Humberside had two villages called Wold Newton, one at its northernmost end, the other at its southernmost - inconvenient if you cycled to the wrong one.

Or maybe it's just, well, quirky. Here's four odd things I've noticed while browsing the map, lost:

1. The Two Great Tothams
(Make sure it’s the OS map view being displayed, not the road map.) Two separate villages in Essex, both called Great Totham, right next to each other. The result of some ancient factional split? Do they have a Real Great Totham and a Continuity Great Totham?

I cycled there to see what it was like, and sure enough, each village is signposted separately and identically. OS Landranger 168 is your map.

(Image produced from the Ordnance Survey Get-a-map service. Image reproduced with kind permission of Ordnance Survey and Ordnance Survey of Northern Ireland.)

2. Two Goose Greens
More doppelgangers in rural Essex. Just a few kilometres from the twin Great Tothams is a pair of Goose Greens. (?Geese Green.) Find a village called Tendring; the first GG is a kilometre north, the second two kilometres or so north of that. With confusion like this, it's a wonder we ever got the Falklands back. OS Landranger 168 again.

3. An aerial river
Near Littleport in Cambridgeshire is this odd snake of contours (again, select the OS map view). They're the course of an old river whose banks were maintained as the land on either side slowly drained and sank, resulting in the river being higher than surrounding land. OS 143.

4. The only British place-name with an X
Only one place-name in England, as far as I can see, contains an upper-case X. The trick is that it's a Roman numeral, in Ruyton-XI-Towns, a 12th-century compilation-album of a place near Shrewsbury.

Obviously maps don't always correspond on the ground with what you see on paper in front of you. I was once obsessed with a round street in the middle of waste land I'd spotted on a map of London that appeared to be unconnected to the rest of the network. A secret military ring road? Eventually I realised it was the 'O' of 'LONDON'.

More suggestions welcome. More funny stuff coming up, including the point furthest from a road, the centroid of England, and Ordnance Survey maps' blankest square...