Given all the (positive) fuss about Skyride last month (which I bang on about in the forthcoming December issue of Cycling Plus magazine, including 13 jokes and some obscure references to A-level maths) I was surprised that more people didn't point out that you can cycle traffic-free in central London every week.
Each Sunday, the Mall and Constitution Hill, running off from Buckingham Palace, are closed to motor vehicles, meaning you can swan up and down on a bike unassailed by traffic.
Make your own Skyride! Invite friends to come along and pretend to be marshals and tell you to stop doing whatever you're doing and ignore them! Have a picnic in St James's Park without 65,000 people all queueing for the toilet in front of you! Etc.
Cycling through central London gives you some of the world's best city-sightseeing routes.
One of my favourites is the one from Hyde Park to Westminster Bridge, via Wellington Arch (right), Buckingham Palace and the Houses of Parliament. (Google map is below.)
You'll get plenty of photos here, such as the ones they take after arresting you for taking pictures in Parliament Square that helpfully show how tall you are compared to Kevin Spacey.
We did this very route yesterday, on our way back from an afternoon in Hyde Park. On a sunny weekend it's a lovely place to wander round by bike on the traffic-free paths (below right), watching the inline skaters and skateboarders doing that cool fancy-footwork stuff with the sort of plastic beakers you used to get at primary school. Now I know why they were always so scuffed and scratched.
You'll hear many different sorts of language spoken, especially when one of the skaters thinks you're cycling too close to their beakers. On the other side of the Serpentine lake is the Diana Memorial, where you can easily while away an hour trying to work out what it's supposed to be.
There'd been a demo for Gaza in Parliament Square when we went past the Houses of Parliament en route home. We thoroughly approved of this exercise of the right to protest, especially because it meant Westminster Bridge was closed to traffic. Can we have another one next Sunday, on Waterloo Bridge perhaps?
So we could amble across on the wrong side of Westminster Bridge, with the full blessing of the police, with the tarmac entirely to ourselves. Er, except for the tourist flocks of sheep-people all edging backwards, trying to fit the clock tower into their mobile's camera.
It was sunny, so I took some video snippets of that picturesque trip home. They're strung together below. (There's no sound, so nothing to catch you out if you set it going at work.)
And here's a Google map of the route. More photos at www.bike99.com/11.html
It's not about lycra. It's not about racing, or saving the world, or crossing the Nullarbor Plain alone except for the film crew.
It's about the best way of commuting, shopping, sightseeing, socialising, partying, and generally just getting from A to B every day: by bike.
This blog was maintained daily from Jan 2009 to Sep 2010, and occasionally from then until 2013. My new blog, from Feb 2021, is at e2e.bike. It has hundreds of pages on cycle-touring across Britain, Ireland and the rest of the world.
