Category: Monopoly

The dreaded dark-blue widowmaker, and the final square on our Monopoly bike tour, is not a single street, but an area – the square mile or so of ultra-high-rent residential, official and commercial properties between Hyde Park to the west, Oxford St to the north, Regent St to the east, and Piccadilly to the south….

Once a pleasant lane and exclusive residential address marking the east side of Hyde Park, Park Lane was turned into a three-lane torrent of fast traffic, and rather less enticing residential address, in the 1960s. It’s a very unpleasant cycle down its two-thirds of a mile today, assailing you with buses, coaches and fast cars….

Straddling the border between the City and the East End, Liverpool Street Shopping Centre – sorry, Station – is London’s third busiest (Waterloo and Victoria being the top two). If you’re off with your bike to catch a ferry at Harwich, or fly from Stansted, you’ll be coming here. And if airline baggage handling is…

London’s swankiest shopping street – and some may feel there’s one S too many in that description – is not actually called Bond St. It in fact consists of Old Bond St and New Bond St, running on from each other: half a mile of posh boutiques heading south (it’s one-way all the way) from…

Oxford St – an aching east-west mile-and-a-bit of footslogging from Marble Arch to Tottenham Court Road past bully-brand chains and character-free shops – is said to be Europe’s busiest shopping street. It’s an old Roman Road, which explains its straightness – and atmosphere of battle. We don’t like cycling along Oxford St at all. Though…

Every single building in Regent St‘s mightily grand three-quarters of a mile is at least Grade II listed. They’re clearly keen to not to spoil the magnificent early-19th century streetscape by putting in, say, cycle parking. The street runs north (one-way to begin with) from Carlton House (down near St James’s Park) up past Piccadilly…

Stretching the best part of a mile from Piccadilly Circus to the edge of Hyde Park, Piccadilly is an imposing procession of upmarket stores, hotels and organisations. But if you’re heading for Fortnum & Mason’s, the Royal Academy or the Ritz by bike, beware the one-way system that means you can only go eastwards on…

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…