Bike Monopoly 27: Coventry St

The short one-way street of Coventry Street, occupying only 100m from Piccadilly to the north of Leicester Square, is lined with tourist snares: Planet Hollywood, Ripley's Believe It Or Not!, Trocadero, and souvenir-tat places that sell postcards of royalty and snowshaker paperweights with London buses.


So the answer to the question 'how do you like cycling through Coventry St' is therefore 'as quickly as possible' - not easy given its signals-stirred traffic congestion, and lost tourists trying to find their way to Covent Garden with unsuitable maps.

Your escape route is right, down Haymarket, and then off to the bottom of Trafalgar Square. And there, whichever lane you're in, the taxis and buses think it's the wrong one.


Monopoly's Coventry St costs £260. What could this buy you there? With such a sum, given the price of accommodation in London, you could be a budget tourist for a day. Or splash out and visit to Believe It Or Not!, then buy a wodge of postcards of Lady Di and telephone boxes, a tea towel with the comedy rules of cricket on it, a village-pubbe-shaped ornament, a T-shirt saying 'I [heart] London', an overpriced burger 'n' fries, a visit to Mamma Mia!, and a bottle of unpleasant pub wine. And then try and work out if any of those things were actually made in England.

Bike Monopoly 26: Leicester Square

There's no cycling in all-pedestrian Leicester Square, which doesn't allow vehicles. Probably just as well: it would be dangerous dodging the delivery lorries that ply the traffic-free piazza.

Steadily humming by day, the partying Square comes into its own by night. If you pass by it on Charing Cross Road in the small hours, for example, you'll see a noisy throng of bleary-eyed young foreign students blundering around, who have no idea where on earth they are: they're the people driving the bicycle rickshaws which give disgorged clubbers a novelty ride round central London. It would take quite a lot of recreational drugs to get me in the back of one of those things too.


No cycling there may be, but Leicester Square has some of the chunkiest cycle parking in London, more like village-green municipal fencing on steroids than normal racks (right).

You might be using these if you're buying cheap theatre tickets from the kiosk here, or if you're visiting the Square's Wetherspoon's pub Moon Under Water. It's named after George Orwell's 1946 essay listing the ten necessary ingredients of the 'perfect English pub'. These included the provision of mussels and liver-sausage sandwiches and absence of radio and piano, but unaccountably missed out proximity of cycle parking, and doesn't say anything about free provision of wi-fi.


Leicester Square to Covent Garden is said to be one of the most popular tube trips by tourists, even though the distance between them is the shortest between any two Underground stations: 260m. You can walk it, and certainly cycle it, much quicker. The standard non-Oyster tube fare of £4 evidently works out more expensive per mile than the Orient Express.

Monopoly's Leicester Square costs £260. What could this buy you there? Probably one evening's clubbing entertainment for two, finishing with a cycle rickshaw ride to an exciting part of London you've never seen before. Trouble was you asked to be taken to Charing Cross tube.

Bike Monopoly 25: Fenchurch St Station

Hidden away corncrake-like in City back streets, crankingly audible but not visible, Fenchurch Street Station is the most obscure of London's mainline terminuses, and not even connected to the London Underground system. It also has surely the smallest concourse: my mum has made bigger sandwiches.


In fact, for many of us it's a surprise to find it actually exists. I'd never heard anyone mention it, and subsconsciously assumed it was destroyed in the war, or was the spurious result of some misread sign when Vic and Marge scouted London for locations to convert the US board to an English version in the 1930s.

From here, C2C (which I'd always thought was a coast-to-coast bike route) run services to East London and Essexy places such as Grays, Tilbury and Shoeburyness, like a rail network designed by aliens whose sole knowledge of earth came from Ian Dury albums.


They allow bikes on all non-rush hour services, which is good, but request that folding bikes be enclosed in a container or case, which raises the question of how you transport the container or case. You'll probably need a standard upright bike to do that. In which case you don't need the case.

There's no bike parking immediately outside the station, but there are some racks opposite the station in nearby Mark Lane.

Monopoly's Fenchurch St Station costs £200. What could this buy you there? You could get (by chucking in an extra tenner) a monthly season ticket between here and Basildon or East Tilbury, if you lived in this part of Essex. This is only a possibility, not a recommendation.

Oh deer: Tea-shop story from the Highlands

Many of the best encounters you have on cycle trips come in tea shops. On our recent trip to Scotland we were pleased to see some red deer wandering round the hills on Glenelg peninsula near Arnisdale. We thought this was Scottish enough, but there was more.


We were a bit taken aback two minutes later to find that one of the stags was a regular in Sheena's Tea Shop, a delightfully make-do hut in the remote village of Corran. There it is, waiting to be served, or possibly checking it out for a stag do.


Apparently it's called Bin Laden, after its ability to disappear. The name is pronounced 'bin lay-den', which sounds like a house name for retired cycle tourers.

Cycle and be dammed: Derbyshire reservoirs are the Peak

One of my favouritest day-trips in all the world is a reservoir circuit in the Peak District. Three hours takes you round a chain of reservoirs (Ladybower, Derwent, Howden) just north of the Hope Valley. It's day-trippable from London (to Bamford, change at Sheffield: 3hr each way; I did my return the other day, with bike, for £25). There's a map below.


The scenery is awesome, the dam engineering impressive, and the route is essentially flat. It's a mixture of tarmac (roads which are traffic-free at weekends, and quiet at other times) and gravel paths, best on a mountain bike, but doable on a hybrid or sturdy tourer. There's a cafe a third of the way up where you can refuel on pasties, and a crossing-point between sides.


Stop off at the Yorkshire Bridge pub on the way back to the station and enjoy a pint of Pale Rider; even if you've had Peaks drizzle all day, you won't be a pale rider for long.

Here's the Google map. You can go either way round; the right-hand side is mostly track, the left-hand side all tarmac, and it's gently downhill from top to bottom. If you're on a road bike, do it anticlockwise to finish off with some nice smooth downhill; on a mountain bike, do it clockwise to enjoy a more crunchy final descent. There are a few slopes but not really any hills. For a treat after your ride, take a dip in the remarkable outdoor heated pool at Hathersage (open summer only) and take the train back from there. You can swim surrounded by lovely Hope Valley peaks in this charming village, which has an encouraging 2:1 ratio of outdoor shops to estate agents. There's a curiosity nearby: the collapsed road of the old A625 round the side of Mam Tor, which looks like an earthquake zone in some remote Lonely Planet guide. (It's the other route on the map.) This was one of the chapters in my book.

View larger map

Bike Monopoly 24: Trafalgar Square

The focus for important celebrations, such as New Year or winning the war or England regaining the Ashes in 2005, and home to the superb National Gallery, Trafalgar Square's lovely fountains, worthy statuary, and ambling piazza space are not cycling-friendly.


There's no cycling in the square itself (right, though you'll see people scooting across the top bit in front of the National Gallery, below right). There's also no parking (you'll get jumped on by security personnel if you try). And the three sides of the square that have roads are unpleasantly busy with impatient, lane-jumping buses and taxis. Still, it's much more pleasant than it was before the top bit - the road that used to cut the NG off from the square itself - was pedestrianised in 2003.


The nearest cycle parking is round the top-right hand corner opposite the entrance to the National Portrait Gallery, with more dribs and drabs of stands tucked in some of the radial roads from the Square. Unless, of course, you inveigle yourself into a slot on Antony Gormley's rather dull Fourth Plinth project with your bike, though like the rest of the Square, there's nothing to lock it to on the vacant platform.

Trafalgar Square serves a very useful purpose for anyone more familiar with imperial than metric: it is almost exactly a hectare, being just about 100m x 100m. Visualising an acre is even easier, though: just think of the front garden of the house I used to live in outside Hull, except for the patio bit, and quadruple it.

The wonderful (and free) National Gallery is very visitable by bike - there's parking up the left-hand sidestreet, though we know of thefts from there - and it reminds us that the French Fauvist painter Maurice Vlaminck (1876-1958) was also an avid racing cyclist. Hah! Eh bien, Monsieur Monet, zose lillies are vairy naice, but now we see 'ow you manage on Tourmalet or Mont Ventoux, eh?

Monopoly's Trafalgar Square costs £240. What could this buy you there? You could decorate an entire house stylishly with a dozen or so posters of famous paintings bought from the National Gallery shop. For instance, your shower rooms with lines of amphetamines for your media friends could have Turner's Rain, Steam and Speed. You could have Renoir's Umbrellas in the cloakroom, Velazquez's Toilet of Venus in the downstairs bog, and use the Leonardo Cartoon as a caption competition.

Bike Monopoly 23: Fleet St

This quarter-mile tumult of traffic runs west from Ludgate Hill, in sight of St Paul's Cathedral, to the griffin at Temple Bar that marks the boundary of the City where Fleet St segues into Strand.


For decades the street name was a synonym for daily newspapers, but they moved out in the 1980s. Reuters was the last major news outfit to leave the street in 2005. Nowadays the Fourth Estate slags off cyclists from Wapping and Canary Wharf instead.

The road is still home to many important organisations, including the intriguingly-named International Dispute Resolution Centre. This may be handy if you get into a territorial conflict with a honking taxi in one of the street's zig-zagging chicanes where the street switches between double and single lanes.


And if the conflict makes it to court, you might be defended by a legal team that trained or practise at one of the many Inns of Court, just off Fleet St. They're fun to poke around by bike, with their quiet college-like courts and quads just the width of a legal tome from the road.

Just off Fleet St is the fascinating Temple Church. The old HQ of the Knights Templar, it's featured in the famous book The Da Vinci Code. From the time I picked it up to the time I put it down, I couldn't stop turning to the next page, to see if I could find something worth reading.


As with most London thoroughfares, there's nowhere near enough bike parking on Fleet St, even though there are lots of useful shops you might want to park outside.

Last month, for various reasons, I had to take a picture of a certain Fleet St building from a first-floor ledge opposite. As it happened, the first-floor ledge belonged to Hoare's Bank, which kindly arranged to let me in to take the snap. Just as well all those newspaper hacks have moved out of Fleet St - goodness knows what they'd think in the middle of a financial crisis if they'd seen a bloke standing out on a bank's window ledge.

Monopoly's Fleet St costs £220. What could this buy you there? About half an hour of legal time from the snazzier legal practices in one of the Inns of Court. Probably better not to get dragged into any legal disputes, then. Especially libel. Jeremy Clarkson, I take it all back.