58km Rivers Rom and Beam
Ride Overview
Just as rough wood, concrete, pitted metal, or rock can be beautiful both to behold and to touch, so too are the the ancient forests, rivers and heathlands of East London. The route is a journey into a gritty and unkempt part of London and is all the richer and more exciting for it. But it’s not all a post-industrial landscape, for there are too, superb gravel tracks, ancient estates, semi-wild horses, grasslands, former gravel pits landscaped into Country Parks. Beyond all else, the gravel tracks are probably the best gravel riding you can do within Greater London’s boundary. In the parks cycling is not just tolerated, but encouraged. It is the sort of ride that you choose when you need a break from conventional urban riding, from its manicured and ordered state, when you wish to be wild and free.
Ride practicalities
Ride Practicalities
START/FINISH: Barking Riverside DISTANCE: 58km TOTAL ASCENT: 380m TERRAIN AND SURFACES: The route may be muddy after rain beside the River Rom and through Havering Country Park. For the rest, it is firm gravel paths or tarmac RECOMMENDED CAFÈS/PUBS; There are cafés in Eastbrook Country Park, Gidea Park, Barking Riverside NEARBY MAINLINE TRAIN SERVICES: Barking. Also the Suffragette Overground Line LINKS TO OTHER RIDES: Eastern Gems
NB: Recommended Cafés, pubs, camping, accommodation are those which meet the WMWG mark of quality.
Ride Notes
Leaving Barking Riverside, with its new Uber Thames Clipper pier and stylish London Overground terminus, you enter into Barking’s Brave New World - ‘A place to be, become and belong’, according to the marketing. 10,800 new homes on this formerly heavily industrialised landscaped of chemical plants, coal-fired power stations, car assembly plants. Now, it is gleaming. New bike paths curve around well-planted flower beds, grass is mown, buildings are on a human scale.
Barking Riverside
From the Riverside, curiosity may lead you to the mouth of the confluence of the Roding with the Thames. It is a short and rough ride, as gritty, as you’ll ever wish for. Connoisseurs of urban neglect and degradation will enjoy riding past the remnants of the old power station, (in its day, the largest in the UK) its yard once full of coal now filled with containers. Pylons, sub-stations, fly tipping, parked up lorries. Dust and Dirt. Severely pock-marked roads. Tyre shops. Dickensian in its gloom and neglect, but beautiful in a weird sort of abandoned way.
Creekmouth, Roding Flood Defence Barrier
The creek is tidal and the enormous flood barrier (built in 1983) looks like a guillotine for beheading giants. In the shadow of the flood barrier is a sad little park, as sorry as a park can be. Discarded Eastern European beer cans, bags, food wrappings, colour sprays on stone benches, grass. Wheeling gulls. The melancholy mood is added to when you learn that England’s worst river disaster took place right in front of the barrier on the Thames in 1878. The Princess Alice, a pleasure paddle steamer returning from a day trip to Sheerness took the wrong line around the bend in the river and collided with a collier, SS Bywell Castle. An hour before the collision, the regular daily discharge of over 75,000 gallons of raw sewage had been released into the Thames. Over 600 people died in the river not it is said,by drowning, but by asphyxiation from the noxious gases which hovered over the top few inches of water.
River Roding, Barking
Rather than riding along River Road, a narrow lorry-fest of a lane, return to the Riverside station and join C42, a sparkling new cyclepath which takes you into Barking. Then it’s a noisy (but protected) cyclepath for a couple of hundred metres alongside the A13 to the River Roding. You ride around the harbour which was home to England’s - some sources say the world’s - largest fishing fleet. Before the age of refrigeration the boats, known as ‘smacks’ had a hold filled with sea water into which the caught and still alive fish were thrown. From the port, carts loaded with barrels of sea water, took the herring, sprats and other live fish into London.
The Temple, Wanstead Flats
A cyclepath leads upstream onto the Wanstead Flats, the southernmost point of Epping Forest. A tangle of elders, poplars, willows, brambles, reeds and nettles crowd the river. Visually the riverbanks is an unkempt mess, but it is exuberantly alive. Birds and insects love it. The fly, and flit, dart and dive. Wildflowers are abundant. For all this, the soundscape is still very much city - the six-lane North Circular is nearby, behind trees. Continue northwards on a roughish, verdant path, rich and green, passing Redbridge (so called for the ‘red-bricked bridge’ which crossed the Roding) and up to Chigwell.
Havering Country Park
At Chigwell, you leave the Roding (which springs near Stansted Airport) and begin a supreme section through Hainault Forest. The curious name derives from Henehout, an old English word for ‘community wood’ - the community being Barking Abbey. It is the last surviving part of the The Royal Forest of Essex. The cycling is on wide and often firm tracks through woodland. After all the industry, noise and rough-hewn nature so far, to be immersed in the immensity of an ancient forest, whilst still within the bounds of Greater London, is quite the thing. Out of the woods, there are a series of London’s greatest gravel tracks. Real gravel. Fast and straight.
Wellingtonia Avenue
You ride past sprawling grassland, habituated by semi-wild horses, and then into more dense woodland which forms part of the Havering Country Park. Here, you pedal up the Wellingtonia Avenue, an impressive double row of Californian redwoods. Planted nearly 150 years ago by the McIntosh family who owned the local mansion they might, over the next few hundred years, rival the redwoods in California, the world’s tallest trees.
Havering-atte-Bower
Havering-atte-Bower, a contenderl for the quirkiest place name in London, was until 1620, the location of one of the principle Royal Palaces of London, the official residence of England’s Queens. Nothing now remains of the sprawling complex, instead there are clapperboard houses surrounding a village green, a flint church, oak trees, a stable yard and in summer, roses in the cottage gardens. It’s all very English, and far removed from any traditional image of London.
From Havering you ride back down to the Thames valley via a mix of woods, fields, a walled garden (Bedford Park), wilderness, playgrounds before joining Black’s Brook through a succession of well maintained parks; Bedford Park, Raphael Park, Gidea Park.
Eastbrook Country Park
Then there is Romford. The town struggles somewhat in the visual appeal stakes. The route seeks out as many quiet estate roads as possible, but there are a couple of kilometres of busier-than-ideal sections, before entering Eastbrook Country Park. The park is part of the Thames Chase Trust which has, since the millennium, sought to regenerate much of the former industrial wastelands of East London. To date over a million trees have been planted, lakes cleaned, soil decontaminated. Eastbrook, a former gravel and sand quarry which became a landfill site, has been transformed into a country park of lakes, wildflower meadows, grasslands and stands of trees. Gravel paths wind this way and that. Cycling is permitted, even encouraged.
Black’s Brook joins the River Rom, which after a few kilometres becomes the River Beam. Name changes notwithstanding, the green corridor links Eastbrook with Beam Country Park, another former industrial site and another fabulous place to ride a bike. It’s easy to become distracted with the flowing gravel paths that disappear into scrub, mount hillocks for a whizz down the other side, which pace over grasslands and flow around lakes, and why not? Have a play, ride like a kid with a broad grin on your face before rejoining the route towards Dagenham Dock.
Barking Riverside’s new Overground (Suffragette Line)
In 1707, the sea wall was breached by a tidal surge and 5,000 acres of previously reclaimed land was flooded. The repairs to the wall were claimed to be the 'most difficult civil engineering feat' of 18th century. Industry is still very much part of the area. The Ford Factory, aggregates, oil storage, and strangely several food processing plants including Hovis. You return to the world of dust, grit and noise. There’s a cycle lane on Choat’s Road, but such is the accumulation of the city’s shedded skin, that it is sometimes better just to ride on the road. It’s not all bleak and grim, for marsh harriers patrol The Gores, an area of scrubland where the Beam joins the Thames. Soon you are back into the ordered world of Barking Riverside where trains or boats await.
Every route on this website has been carefully researched as well as ridden. However situations on the ground can change quickly. If you know of changes to this route, or cafes, pubs and the like which you think other cyclists need to know about, feel free to share your thoughts below.
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