Author: Rob Ainsley

We wondered what the best waterworks-based cycle experience would be. Cycling past Bazalgette’s Cathedral of Sewage, perhaps, on the Greenway? But the Greenway’s out in remote east London, and rather dull. There’s little look at except the broken glass shards in the middle of the path, little to do except mend your punctures en route,…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

Gershwin’s song ‘Strike up the Band’ was apparently referred to by wordplay-happy British musicians as ‘Bike up the Strand’, no doubt to the mystification of our mid-20th-century transatlantic chums. In practice, biking up Strand‘s three-quarters of a mile (no definite article – at least, not according to the streetname signs) can be a very tedious…

Vine St may be the shortest street on the Monopoly board – barely 40m – yet, in its short space, it achieves something remarkable: it has absolutely nothing of note at all. No shops, interesting facades or even lamppost to lock a bike to: just a dull, scruffy cul-de-sac with a few rear entrances mooning…

There isn’t actually a Marlborough Street (except for the one in Kensington SW3, which is clearly not what they mean). There’s only the Batman of Great Marlborough Street and its Robin of Little Marlborough Street, just off Regent Street and Carnaby Street. The greater of the two is a shortish, typical busy central London street,…

Brief Bow Street, bordering Covent Garden, was the historic home to the Bow Street Runners; it also housed a magistrate’s court, which closed in 2006. This was a grand building where you had to listen to people in silly outfits droning on at you with arcane jargon, and pay large amounts of money for your…