Stretching a mile from Regent’s Park to King’s Cross station, Euston Road vies with Old Kent Road as the most unpleasant Monopoly street to bike along. Like a speeding driver uncertain whether to answer their mobile phone, finish eating their cheesburger, or change the CD first, Euston Road hasn’t quite decided whether it’s a fast,…
Author: Rob Ainsley
Monopoly 4: The Angel, Islington
The Angel, Islington isn’t a street or locality. Originally it was a pub, then a tea house. In the late 1930s, Yorkshire-based Waddington’s Games sent down their MD Victor Watson and his secretary Marjory Philips to scout for London locations to put on the US game they’d just bought the rights for. Vic and Marge,…
Monopoly 3: Kings Cross Station
The first of the Monopoly board’s four stations, King’s Cross is your gateway to the north. But gateways are often awkward to negotiate with a bike. But the train companies operating from here – four of them, soon to become five – all allow bikes (except for certain rush-hour commuter services). The AtoB website has…
Monopoly 2: Whitechapel Rd
Whitechapel Road is a busy main road – the A11, in fact – running through London’s East End, for about half a mile between Whitechapel High St and Mile End. It’s packed with shops and sprinkled with bike parking. The buildings ranging from the historic Bell Foundry (right, the oldest manufacturing company in Britain, dating…
Monopoly 1: Old Kent Road
In this series of posts, I’m cycling the streets and properties of the classic UK Monopoly game board. The only south London property on the board, Old Kent Road runs for about a mile and a half from the Bricklayer’s Arms roundabout (right), with its flyover, to New Cross Road. Chaucer’s pilgrims travelled this way…
Kinloch Hourn: Dead end job
This is one of the strangest tarmac roads in Britain: a 22-mile long single-lane cul-de-sac that simply stops dead at the end of Britain’s most fjord-like loch, many miles from anywhere. I rode it today, with my chum Gary. It’s the road from near Invergarry, on the Great Glen Fault in northern Scotland, to Kinloch…
Scarborough: Cinder Trail to Whitby
The 25-mile Scarborough to Whitby railtrail (all pictures), part of National Cycle Route 1, is one of the best cycle experiences in Britain, yet it’s curiously overlooked. It’s longer, more scenic, more varied, and more convenient than the much more feted Camel Trail for instance. But we know the world sometimes works like that: Avebury…
Horkstow Bridge: Little to Humber’s Large
Not far from the Humber Bridge is another crossing that’s a little-known gem, and one that’s effectively only open to pedestrians and cyclists. (Cars can in theory use it, except there’s no road on the other side, only a dirt track.) Horkstow Bridge (pics), just 20 minutes’ bike ride south into Lincolnshire from the Humber…
Humber Bridge: Still a world-beater for bikes
Stats define us: dress size, batting average, salary. And when suspension bridges get together for a night out, they judge themselves against their peers by socially competing about the length of their main spans. When the mighty Humber Bridge opened in 1981, it was the longest single-span suspension bridge in the world, with towers 1410m…
Padstow: Humping along the Camel Trail
I did the Camel Trail today. The scenic Cornish railtrail follows the Camel Estuary and ends up majestically in Padstow, England’s fish-restaurant capital. (As in, ‘expensive, with a capital F’.) It’s said to be England’s most popular family-cycling route, with half a million users a year. It was sunny and warm all day and the…