60km An explosive ride
Ride overview
The constant re-generation of London is frankly, incredible. This superb and almost entirely traffic-free route is a ride through the green urban wilderness where whitethroats and blackcaps sing, where kestrels hover over the vast expanses of marshlands, yet where until the 1960s, weapons of war were mass produced all along the route. Historically and also as a cycling route, the ride is fascinating - it is as near to traffic-free perfection as you can get in London. There are expansive marshlands, the wide and lugubrious river Thames, the bustle of Silvertown and the long ride up the lush river Lea to finish at the Royal Gunpowder Works, where remnants of the munitions factories remain amidst bucolic greenery, now home to rare dragonflies and the like.
Route revised February 2023
Ride details
To read the article about this ride, click here
Alighting from the train at Slade Green, surrounded by housing, it is hard to believe that you are standing in what was one of London’s major ordnance centres. To the north in Crayford, the Maxim Nordenfeldt Gun and Ammunition Company works operated from 1887, making the world’s first machine gun, the Maxim. By 1914, the Vickers machine gun, a development of the Maxim, was being produced in great numbers by a workforce of over 12,000, which included Belgian refugees. Early airplanes were also made, including it is thought, the machine that was flown across the Atlantic by Alcock and Brown in June 1919.
As you ride down Moat Lane, you enter a wide-open landscape where the cloudscape is often thrilling and the rough pasture of the marshlands extends as far as the eye can see. After a few metres of rutted track, you pass a dilapidated farm, whose yard is filled with cars in various states of ruination and rust. In amongst the debris, is an outstanding Jacobean tithe barn as well as the remains of Bishop Odo’s (King William I’s half-brother) manor house, surrounded by a moat, which took a direct hit in the bombing raids of 1940. Taking the hedge-lined path, you continue on a rough and sometimes muddy track across the Crayford Marshes where, dotted over the rough pasture are a scatter of small, well-spaced buildings. Some are being reclaimed by brambles and elder trees and some are just falling down. The remoteness of this place made it a suitable site for both the National Trench Warfare Factory and The Thames Munitions Works. Not only was the area thinly populated, but it was near to river transport along which ordnance was transferred upstream to Woolwich. After WWI, many munitions had to be de-activated and taking them apart was as dangerous as putting them together. In 1924, a sudden fire in the factory caused a massive explosion, with the loss of ten womens’ lives.
The views become even wider as you reach the Thames. The riding is full of freshness and the air is rich in ozone mingled with sniffs of mud and salt. Reeds rustle and mix with clanging of the scrap metal merchants behind a wall. As you ride up the shared path beside the road, passing more metal scrap merchants, bus depots and aggregate industries, the noise becomes quite deafening.
Once out of Erith - having stopped for a coffee at the Bookshop Deli - the riding is both incongruous and exciting as you pedal along a flower lined, traffic-free river path through a richly industrial landscape interspersed with Nature Parks and SSSIs. You pass Edible Oils (where much of the UK’s kitchen oils are produced), Tarmac and concrete factories, metal works and distribution centres. Mixed in with the dusty factory blocks are examples of striking architecture, such as the shapely Cory Riverside Energy plant and one of the greatest monuments to Victorian engineering in the UK, the Crossness Pumping station, which is occasionally open for visitors. Check here for further information.
You’d not have been allowed anywhere near this route beside the Thames, until the late twentieth century, for this place simply did not exist - officially. Maps were just left blank. For as you ride towards Woolwich, where now there is reclaimed marshland and housing, there were top secret firing ranges, railways, roads and factories where over 75,000 people worked, including 25,000 women at the height of WWI. You can read more about it here.
The River Lea
It is hard to credit this dedication to death and destruction as you sit on top of the man made mound in Gallions Park surveying a stupendous view over London. Perhaps even less so as you ride through the heart of the Arsenal along the tranquil Broadwater canal, along which barges arrived from The Royal Gunpowder Mills at Waltham.
From Woolwich, you take the foot tunnel under the Thames to Silvertown. This is a raw part of London, dominated by the enormous sugar factory of Tate and Lyle as well as the re-landscaped Royal Docks.
Another huge munitions factory, belonging to Brunner and Mond was situated in what is now the car park for the Thames Barrier Gardens. On 19th January 1917, 50 tonnes of TNT caught alight and blew the factory apart. The noise was heard over 100 miles away and it remains the biggest explosion ever to have happened in London. Secondary fires broke out for miles around, including the gasometer at Greenwich where 200,000 cubic metres of gas caught fire. The contrast between these explosions and the haven of modern landscape design beside the river could not be more stark, nor more lovely.
Having ridden through Canning Town and Plaistow, where there is little to distract you, you arrive at the Lee Navigation Canal, which you follow through the Olympic Park to the Hackney Marshes. The riding is all traffic-free. It’s a beautiful and varied blend of Olympic Stadia, sensational modern designs and spacious marshland filled to overflowing with willows and reeds and grassy playing fields. Across the canal at Mabley Green, a large open space of grass and trees, was the enormous National Projectile Factory, where six inch shells were manufactured in their millions from 1915 to 1922.
Canal boat’s garden, River Lea
From here until the end, it’s positively bucolic riding. There is the companionship of the canal, its boats strung along the banks, plants on top of barges as well as flowers beside the path. Intermittently, there are blocks of industry. There is some fabulous wall art along the way as well as marshes with their reeds and warblers, nature reserves with their rare insects and the great blue lakes of the Lea Valley. You ride through Enfield Lock, now a serene stretch of canal, where for 200 years the Royal Small Arms Factory turned out the British infantry’s weapons, including the famous Enfield Rifle.
After 26km of entirely traffic-free riding, you turn off the canal, ride through Gunpowder Park and into the Royal Gunpowder Mills, another verdant park, where for 300 years, gunpowder, propellants and explosives were made. Nature is everywhere, deer skip through trees, rare dragonflies hover. Innocuous looking buildings hide a fearsome past. In forest clearings are structures with ominous names such as the Burning Grounds, The Grand Nitrator and the Quinan Drying Stove. Vegetation softens their concrete edges and their past is hard to fathom amidst such lush country. There are tours around the once top secret grounds and a museum, and a good cafe.
Ride practicalities
START/FINISH: Crayford/Waltham Abbey DISTANCE: 61KM. TOTAL ASCENT: 307m TERRAIN AND SURFACES: River and canal paths with some quiet road sections through Silvertown and Cannings Town. MAINLINE TRAIN SERVICES: Crayford/ Cheshunt LINKS TO OTHER RIDES: The glorious East End, On the fringes of the Thames, Parks and Dinosaurs, Three Rivers, NCN 1 Greenwich to Ipswich, NCN1 Dover to Greenwich RECOMMENDED FOOD AND DRINK; Erith, The Bookstore Deli and Restaurant, Greenwich; Tottenham Hale; The Ferry Boat Inn.
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