Author: Rob Ainsley

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…

Take a trip to Marylebone station and you’ll find a mainline terminus with a bit of bike parking inside, beyond the barrier line (50-odd spaces on Platform 3) but absolutely none outside. Signs warn you sternly not to park your bike on the railings. Many of the signs are easy to miss, though, because they’re…

In one of those amusing and inexplicable quirks of the Monopoly board, Northumberland Avenue – a short, relatively humdrum back street – is rated more expensively than Whitehall next door. Its four hundred yards of dull, stony, hotel-front grandeur runs from Trafalgar Square (right) to the big traffic on Victoria Embankment by the top of…

I like cycling up Whitehall. It’s the nearest I’ll ever get to political power. The half-mile of broad tarmac runs from Parliament Square up to Trafalgar Square, and its austere and imposing big buildings – appropriately, all light-grey – include several government departments and ministries (Admiralty, DoE, DEFRA, MoD, Cabinet Office, Health, Pensions, FCO, Treasury…

When Charles Darrow didn’t invent Monopoly in the 1930s, he can’t have imagined that in future your electricity company would also try to sell you gas, telephony, insurance and broadband internet. (We get our electricity from something called Eon, which hitherto I thought was a famous French transvestite, which shows you why I’d never cut…

Famous for its gentleman’s clubs, Pall Mall is a third of a mile of grand buildings running from near Trafalgar Square in the east to St James’s Palace in the west (bottom right). It’s one way westwards – meaning an irritating walk along the pavement if you’re heading eastwards (right) – and when you are…

Pentonville Road is a half-mile of shabby, stick-straight gradient between King’s Cross station and the Angel. Its bottom, by KX, is dirty and dusty, with discarded chicken takeaway boxes swirling round to provide you with slalom practice. It’s a tedious, trafficky, fumiferous slog to cycle up. And an equally tedious freewheel down the other way,…