Become a supporter
Believe it or not, you can sometimes take your bike on the tube. The older 'sub-surface' lines (Circle, District, Metropolitan, Hammersmith & City) permit the carriage of bicycles. They're forbidden on other tubes, except for the above-ground stretches at the end of the lines.
In any case, bikes are banned at rush hour (7.30-9.30am and 4-7pm). Folding bikes are permitted throughout the network at all times, but taking one through central London at rush hour won’t make you popular.
Mainline trains all have space for bikes, but there are outright bans or heavy restrictions at rush hour.
On commuter lines, forget about taking a full-size bike at rush hour (usually trains arriving in the city before 10am, and leaving between 4.30pm and 7pm). At other times, you can often stash your bike in a vestibule. Some trains do have dedicated spaces, indicated by a bike symbol on a carriage door.
On long-distance trains, you’re generally required to book a bike space in advance (do this online using the East Coast website), whether off-peak or rush hour. Policy varies from company to company: First Great Western will let you take your bike without booking if there’s space available, but Virgin always insists on booking.
There's one way to get round the restrictions. Folding bikes are exempt from train restrictions, and can be stashed in the luggage rack or discreetly in the vestibule. Today's models are pleasant and easy to ride round town; once you’re used to the twitchy steering, it's only on steep hills that you'll feel the difference from a full-size bike.
Bear in mind that the largest ‘folders’ are too big for luggage racks, and that a cheap unbranded folding bike is almost always a false economy. Expect to pay at least £500 for a good model and often much more, but note that Brompton offer sizeable discounts to London Cycling Campaign members.
Bikes have been banned on the DLR since its inception, but in July 2013, the regulations were changed (for a “trial period”). They’re now allowed outside peak hours, with a maximum of two bikes per set of doors.
There are cycle routes to Heathrow and Gatwick, but they’re both a dismal slog through suburbia. So unless you live nearby, we’d reluctantly advise catching the train.
From the city centre, it'll take you a good few hours to wend through London's suburbs on your way to the countryside. You might be lucky and find a nearby traffic-free route such as the Wandle Trail or the River Lee towpath; more likely, your choice will be between quiet and indirect residential roads, and fast but busy arterials. The Avenue Verte (to Paris) and the London-Brighton run might sound enticing, but the posters never boast about the time you spend negotiating Croydon.
Here’s where the trains come in; the countryside is only as far as your nearest mainline station. An afternoon in Kent? Head to Victoria. The Cotswolds? Just turn up at Paddington. You can even get to the Chilterns by tube (Chesham and Amersham are on the Met).
Cycling is a way of life for many Londoners – such as the bike couriers you'll see weaving their way through City traffic at frankly implausible speeds.
Much though we live and breathe the gospel about sustainability, liveable cities and street space, we’ll admit that London’s new-found love for cycle cafés is quite the most fun part about the city’s bike boom.
Quite why bikes, coffee and cake go so well together we couldn’t say. But they do: try the relaxed canalside Lock 7, the perpetually fashionable Rapha Cycle Club, or the all-encompassing Look Mum No Hands for starters. Some cycle cafés are essentially bike shops which serve coffee; others aren’t really cycle cafés as such, just coffee shops that have been colonised by cyclists. Some attract seasoned Tour-watchers, others are meeting points for bike couriers; some have climbing skills seminars, others knitting evenings. But none will turn you away even if you arrive on a Boris bike or a battered old hybrid. We’re all cyclists, after all.
Bike jumbles, usually staged out in the suburbs, combine second-hand kit with cycling artisans' stalls and, often, a selection of gorgeous hand-made bikes. Herne Hill Velodrome hosts the best-known London event, recently joined by a monthly jumble at the London Bike Kitchen in Hackney. There are more, but publicity is sporadic to say the least. Check out bikejumbles.co.uk and the London Cycling Campaign’s calendar for listings.
Fed up of cycling solo? LCC local groups organise regular, gently-paced social rides, and there’s always the CTC and British Cycling’s member clubs for the faster cyclist. Perhaps the most uplifting experience is joining a campaign ride, organised occasionally to fight for better cycling conditions in London: check out cycle.travel’s news pages for information about upcoming events. There’s also a monthly Critical Mass ride, starting under Waterloo Bridge (South Bank) at 6pm on the last Friday of the month.
Cycling in London wins out over driving on pretty much every count, but none more than parking. Residents’ permits, dank underground caverns, awkward reverses… all a thing of the past.
If you keep your bike inside, ask your local bike shop for wall-mounted or ceiling-mounted racks to save on space. You’ll be taking your bike out 300+ times a year, so buy something convenient, not just clever. If you’re lucky enough to have an outside yard or shed, then don’t skimp on security: thieves know about these, and will think nothing of scaling a wall to steal the bike on the other side.
London has so many commuter cyclists that major employers compete to be cycle-friendly. Secure bike parking is an absolute minimum; many also provide workplace showers and lockers for your pannier or backpack. Good employers will also take part in the ‘Cycle to Work’ scheme, where you can buy a bike tax-free (up to a maximum of £1,000).
Most importantly, a cycle-friendly employer won’t blink if you choose to cycle to a meeting rather than taking the tube, or you’re 15 minutes late due to an unexpected puncture. (After all, they really don’t want to rent a car parking space for you.) Weigh up the facilities when applying for jobs.
Birmingham may have more miles of canal than London, but the capital’s towpaths are still popular cycling routes. The Regent’s Canal runs from Limehouse to Paddington, continuing to Southall as the Grand Union Paddington Arm. The Grand Union itself runs from the Thames at Brentford north towards Watford, and the canalised River Lee heads north from Limehouse towards Tottenham and Enfield.
Canal paths are great places to gather your confidence for a first-time commute, and by all means use them if you're not in a hurry. The Canal & River Trust (formerly British Waterways) is improving the towpaths where it can, but at heart these are narrow, shared-use routes. In central London, they can be congested, especially the east-west Regent’s Canal at rush hour. Further out, the towpath is often unsurfaced and bumpy. So if fast cycling is your bag, we'd recommend you stick to the roads.
You no longer need to download a permit for canal cycling, but the Canal & River Trust asks you to ring your bell and slow down for pedestrians: as the Two Tings campaign would have it, “ting twice, be nice”. Watch out, too, for boaters stepping on and off their craft.
You can’t cycle the whole of the Thames Path in London, but there are several opportunities for traffic-free riverside cycling.
National Cycle Network route 4 largely follows the river. More on-road than off, it leads you out to the west along pleasant backstreets.
In Central London, the south bank is invariably crammed with pedestrians and as such not suitable for cycling, while the Embankment (north bank) is a busy road. You can approach the riverside at Tate Modern and largely continue parallel to the south bank east from there, from where the roads of Wapping, Limehouse and Rotherhithe will keep you close to the shore. There’s rarely a continuous riverside path, however. From Greenwich onwards, you can follow the south bank all the way to Dartford with the occasional interruption.
But the best riverside cycling is in West London. Join the south bank at Putney and follow it all the way to Weybridge, with a brief stretch on the north bank after Kingston. This is almost entirely off-road, well signposted as part of NCN 4, and pubs and cafés are plentiful. It’s perhaps the finest traffic-free cycling experience in London.
Cycling is allowed on certain routes in the capital’s parks, adding up to 60 miles in all. Half of these are shared-use paths, the other half are roads. The latter have less traffic than other London roads, though we’re not quite sure why taxis are allowed into Hyde Park at all!
Still, these routes can be a godsend. Cycling past Speaker’s Corner in Hyde Park, for example, is infinitely preferable to negotiating Marble Arch and Park Lane. The paths tend to be busy with pedestrians who don’t always notice the white line marking out their space, so don’t expect to go too fast.
Cycling isn’t permitted throughout the parks, just on the roads and a few selected paths. You can be fined up to £200 if you’re spotted on a footpath, so watch out for ‘No Cycling’ stencilled on the entrance to paths. You can also be fined for cycling faster than 10mph in the Royal Parks (20mph in Richmond Park, Greenwich Park and Bushy Park).
As an organisation, the Royal Parks are lagging behind the rest of London in their attitude to cycling, and have expressed some opposition to Boris Johnson’s plans for new routes.
London doesn’t have many of the traffic-free cycle trails that Sustrans specialises in building. (This is partly because few London railways have closed, which of course is good news!)
The best-known, in East London, is simply called the Greenway. It follows the embankment under which the Northern Outfall Sewer is buried, from Bow eastwards to Beckton via Stratford and West Ham. There’s a useful link with the River Lee towpath at the western end.
The 12-mile Wandle Trail heads south from the Thames through Wandsworth to Croydon, while the 8-mile Waterlink Way runs from the Cutty Sark at Greenwich to New Beckenham. They piece together park paths, riverside cycleways and short sections of road. Their piecemeal nature makes them better for unhurried leisure cycling, and do watch out for the frequent gates on the Wandle Trail.
The canny London cyclist will plan a route that follows residential streets where possible, rather than the busy thoroughfares favoured by buses and lorries. Unless you’re a fixie-toting bike messenger, the safer streets more than make up for any extra mileage.
Hackney, Camden, and even the City of London itself have embarked on programmes to stop residential streets turning into rat-runs. These ‘tamed’ roads now make for some of the best cycling in London.
The first tactic is turning through roads into cul-de-sacs for cars. Bollards prevent motorists from driving through, but cyclists and pedestrians can still get past.
Similar to this is the cycle contraflow. This is where a road is one-way for motorists, but two-way for cyclists.
You won’t find these marked on the motorist-centric A-Z, so check with a proper cycle map or route-planner. Unfortunately, it’s rare that you can put together a whole route from these calmed roads, especially when you need to cross an obstacle such as the River Thames or the North Circular Road.
A few bollards don’t make an Amsterdam, of course. Junctions are dangerous just the same, and you still have to watch out for manoeuvring cars. There’s also the ever-present ‘door zone’ – the metre-wide strip beside parked cars, where a door could suddenly be opened on you.
Yet it’s the best London has to offer, and explains why Hackney has more cyclists than any UK city bar Cambridge, Oxford and York. Other boroughs (notoriously the cycle-hostile City of Westminster) are far behind, and it’s to be hoped that the Mayor of London’s promised Quietways will go some way in dragging them forward.
Around one in five of the capital’s roads now has a 20mph speed limit, making them more enjoyable for cycling.
Islington, Camden, Southwark and the City of London have all set it as their default speed limit. The outer London boroughs and (as ever) Westminster are still holding out at 30mph or more.
Major roads are controlled by Transport for London, not the boroughs, and these mostly retain their 40mph and 50mph limits for now. However, TfL has suggested that lower limits could be introduced in future.
Cycling in London is the best way to arrive at work every day with a smile on your face. Whatever the slings and arrows of outrageous road design may throw at you, it’s (almost) always worth it.
But we can’t deny that the road design is, indeed, often outrageous. London’s main roads are not a flower-strewn paradise of cycling happiness and we wouldn’t pretend they were. Rather, they’re the busiest, most frenzied, and densest in Britain.
At every traffic light, an aggressive tide of cars, buses and lorries waits impatiently to push through. So although this page may appear stern, it’s because we want you to emerge safe from your encounters with London traffic.
As a general rule, most London cycling accidents happen at junctions: roundabouts where traffic is accelerating fast to get a space, complex networks of turnings such as the Kings Cross area, or simple left-turns where cars cut you up. You can’t avoid the last-named, but where possible, consider planning your journey to avoid the busiest major road junctions. Unfortunately, a Cycle Superhighway is no guarantee that the junctions will be safe.
Some roundabouts have pavement routes, but these are invariably slower, forcing you to balance speed against safety. When you do cross a busy roundabout, being assertive and ‘taking the lane’ will get you across more safely than skulking in the gutter and running the risk of being swiped by a left-turning vehicle (much though we hate to say it). Transport planners are experimenting with Dutch-style roundabouts, with a separate outer cycle path, which could offer salvation for these dangerous ‘gyratories’.
London traffic lights invariably have tight timing to usher the maximum number of cars through on each green. In other cities, skipping a red light might earn you an angry gesture or an annoyed beep. In London, it can be genuinely dangerous, particularly on the larger junctions where it takes several seconds to cycle across.
Many junctions have ‘advanced stop lines’ (ASLs), painted spaces for bikes at the front of a traffic light queue. By all means use these if they make your passage easier, but don’t expect much from them: cars frequently trespass on them, and the cycle lanes leading up to them can be dangerous gutters that put you at risk from queuing vehicles. Their main advantage is that they bunch cyclists together, keeping us out of lorries’ blind spots and making us more visible to drivers.
Mouthy cabbies are a London caricature, and the private-hire stealth vehicles of Addison Lee are the guys we love to hate.
All frivolity aside, though, the biggest danger on London’s roads are construction lorries – responsible for 40% of cycling fatalities. We would counsel patience and a very wide berth when you encounter these grumbling, stinking behemoths of the city streets. Please don’t be tempted to squeeze down their side, and don’t put yourself in a position where the driver’s inattention could kill you. Though a few boroughs are now insisting that their contractors fit cycle-safety technology and train their drivers, this is, as yet, a small minority.
London has the best bus service in Britain, and cyclists have full claim to the many bus lanes. Sharing space with a 15-tonne double-decker isn't always a relaxing experience, to say nothing of the taxis; but it helps whisk you through the traffic, and bus drivers are (by and large) skilful and professionally trained.
All the way from its source in the Cotswolds, the River Thames is a barrier to cycling. London is no different. Inevitably, every river crossing is crammed with traffic: Southwark Bridge is perhaps the best of a bad lot. Be especially careful at the junctions on either side where the bridge traffic gathers and disperses.
Dreams of a cycle-only bridge haven’t come to fruition, with Boris choosing to build a cable car instead. Still, there are alternatives in the east: the free Woolwich ferry and the Greenwich Foot Tunnel.
Made in the Cotswolds. Published by Éditions Système D Ltd.
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