45km Purfleet to Paddington
Wellington Arch
Ride Overview:
A monumental ride on London’s first - and longest - dedicated cycle lane, C3.
Arriving by train and cast out on the eastern fringes of the city, under a huge sky, beside the immense and silent Thames, you may feel cast out, as did many of the Victorian smallpox victims who were sent here, to quarantine. As you ride towards the distant skyscrapers of central London, you may find a conflict within you, for here there is a tranquility, born of marsh and reeds, of birds wheeling under wide skies, of space and silence. The riding through Dagenham and onto Barking is not pretty in the conventional sense, rather it is brash and industrial, noisome and dusty, but thrilling in its own way. As you edge nearer to the city, its grandeur and magnificence begin to grip the soul; re-conditioned docklands, gentrified warehouses and familiar Thames-side landscapes. For the final few miles you ride past the great palaces and monuments, until you arrive in the stately magnificence of Hyde Park, where like many homecomings, you arrive with a little regret that the adventure has ended, as well as relief that you made it back from those distant wild-lands safe and sound.
Ride Details
Having taken the train to Purfleet, you find yourself beside a wide and sluggish Thames under a massive sky. You feel as if you could not be further from the city. Indeed you have to ride a couple of kilometres onwards in order to be within the bounds of Greater London. So remote is the place, that not only did Dracula set up a home here, burying his Transylvanian soil where the small church now stands, but gunpowder stores and smallpox isolation stations were erected too.
Following the Thames, you ride on a wonderful path bordering the marshes. Humans have lived here ever since they have inhabited these islands. Stone Age tools, Saxon burial sites containing brooches and swords - all of which are in the British Museum - have been found here. The marshes were used as training grounds for soldiers before their embarkation to the trenches of WW1 and for over 150 years as a landfill site for London’s rubbish. The large mound is being turned into a Country park and soon, there’ll be tracks and trees rather than tractors and earth movers. As you approach Rainham, you’ll see the concrete barges which were built for the assault on Normandy in 1944. Their role today is a very different one as they help to prevent the erosion of the river banks.
After the tranquility and monumentality of the skies, you arrive in Rainham with its intact 900 year old Norman Church one of London’s oldest. Next to the church, is Rainham Hall, built in 1729, the first of many grand Thames-side houses that you’ll pass. The house and garden are managed by the National Trust and make for a lovely first stopping place.
From what was once the bustling port of Rainham, you ride on a cycle path along the backroads of Dagenham Dock and onto Barking Reach. It is an industrial and sometimes noisy section, but as much part of London as Hyde Park. You ride on protected cycleways the whole way until you reach the official start of the C3 cycleway., which heads westwards, on blue tarmac segregated and safe from the busy A13. The route was begun in 2010 and has formed the basis for most of the subsequent traffic-free cycle paths around the city.
At Beckton, things become quieter once more as you ride unknowingly past Europe’s largest sewage works. Nearby is also another rubbish tip, from where quantities of plastic have escaped in the wind. However, soon you arrive at the Royal Docks and the grandeur of London begins. Here until the mid-twentieth century, the world’s largest ships and liners berthed. They were the last of London’s docks to be built and formed the largest area of impounded dock water in the world. The soil which had been excavated was taken upstream to Battersea, to consolidate the marshy land in that part of London. The sheer scale of the docks are staggering and they stretch for almost as far as the eye can see. The scale of the place is perhaps best seen opposite the London City Airport, where the runway for huge jets occupies only a fraction of the dockland area.
As you ride on the continuing blue cycleway of C3 through the streets Limehouse, you begin to appreciate the continuing re-invention of this city. Where once there was great poverty and hardship, the warehouses are now converted into expensive loft apartments and homes. Streets are tidy, homes are painted.
Following the cycle route into the heart of the city, you ride along Cable street, so named because it was where ropes and cables for ships were manufactured. In the 18th century, the street was only the length of a cable (600ft/182m), however it stretches now for the best part of a couple of kilometres. The street achieved fame in 1936 when a group of Fascists let by Sir Oswald Moseley, planned to march along the street to the East End Jewish quarter. Official permission from the police had been granted them, but left-wing parties, and local inhabitants set up barricades to prevent them. A violent clash saw the Fascists turned away and British Fascism never really took root in the way that it did on the Continent. The event is celebrated in a wondrous mural near to Sir Nicholas Hawksmoor’s spectacular church, St. George’s-in-the-East.
As you approach the Tower of London, you pass the Royal Mint, where coinage has been minted since 825. In 1968 minting was transferred to Llantrisant in Wales. No coins have been minted in hte Tower Hill buildings since 1975. Today, the Chinese have applied to buy the site so that they can build their embassy here. So far permission has been denied. The riding from hereon, is a never ending monumental and magnificent London Landscape. It is quite possibly, the most spectacular cycle ride of any world city. There are views everywhere, across to the South Bank, to St. Paul’s and the Inns of Court. It is tempting on a wide and fast cycle path to ride quickly, but a slower dawdling pace is far more rewarding.
The London Eye
Once at Westminster, you ride across Parliament Square and under the clock face of Big Ben, where the bells chime the quarter hour. Some of the great men and women who have influenced this country in a myriad of ways congregate around Square, cast in bronze and mounted on their pedestals. The ride continues past London’s first menagerie - St. James’s Park and down what is the greatest processional route in the world - the Mall. You ride up Constitution Hill and Decimus Burton’s triumphant arch at Hyde Park corner into Hyde Park.
Though it might be hard to believe today, the park was once deepest countryside and nearly a day’s ride from the City of London. It was a home for deer, boar and wild bulls. For 500 years, it was owned by the monks of Westminster, until Henry VIII sequestered it and used it as a hunting ground. Deer were hunted here until 1768. The park has been used for a variety of purposes from military camps during times of danger, such as during the Great Plague of 1665 and the Jacobite Rebellion of 1715, coach racing, promenading and duelling. In 1730, Queen Caroline ordered the Westourne river to be dammed, so creating the Serpentine on which the Battle of Trafalgar was re-enacted in 1815. Cycling around the park is one of the many pleasures of London - great cycle paths, graceful trees, huge expanses of green and many diverting monuments and sculptures. C3 finishes at Lancaster Gate, and from here it is a couple of hundred metres to The Cleveland Arms in Chilworth Street, where you can re-charge before catching a train home from Paddington station.
Ride practicalities
START/FINISH: Purfleet/Hyde Park DISTANCE: 43KM. TOTAL ASCENT: 237m TERRAIN AND SURFACES: Cycle path throughout MAINLINE TRAIN SERVICES: Purfleet/Paddington LINKS TO OTHER RIDES: Brentwood to Rainham Chiswick to Greenwich Heathrow to Ockenden RECOMMENDED FOOD AND DRINK; Rainham; Rainham Hall, Limehouse; The Yurt Cafe, The Grapes, Paddington:The Cleveland Arms
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