NCN 13 - London to Maldon
Coalhouse Fort, Thames Estuary
Ride Overview
The strangest of Ways, the most magnificent of Ways. Leaving London, route 13 is cycle touring taken to another level. Eschewing comfort and ease for something far more memorable. Riding through the deplumed docks of London, the route heads out along the Thames Estuary. Industry, grit, petroleum, container ships, cruise ships, forts. There’s a little portering up and down short flights of steps, some manovering through too narrow gates (built to stop youths from joy riding their stolen mopeds along the Thames paths). It’s a landscape which is both harsh and beguiling. Artists love it for the vibrant light. Writers love it for its mystery. Cyclists love it for the beyond-the-ordinary adventure. Leaving the river, the route heads inland on gravel tracks across Essex to Maldon, the home of salt and oysters. To finish tired and grimey, watching a Thames Barge sail past with its red sails unfurled is quite the end to possibly the most exciting and demanding ride in Southern England.
Ride Practicalities
START/FINISH: The Tower of LondonMaldon DISTANCE: 118km TOTAL ASCENT: 687m TERRAIN AND SURFACES: asphalted bike paths, un-metalled paths, bridlepaths and quiet(ish) lanes. Beside the Thames, where we have joined two sections of ‘the official’ route, you’ll need to carry your bike up and down four series of short steps. In addition, some of the gates on both the official and unoffical sections are very narrow and you may have to porter your bike over them. RECOMMENDED CAFÈS/PUBS; CAMPING: ACCOMMODATION: Maldon: The Hythe NEARBY MAINLINE TRAIN SERVICES: Grays, Tilbury, Basildon, Chemlsford LINKS TO OTHER RIDES: NCN 1, The Tower to Rainham Marshes, Ingrebourne Way (Route 136)
*WMWG only list places for food, drink and beds which have met our strict quality standards. Typically, pubs, restaurants and cafés will promote local growers, are independent who set high standards, but who are not necessarily the cheapest place in town.
Ride Notes
The Kentish Ragstone of the Tower of London’s walls have been scrubbed of their blood and horror and appear nicely groomed for the tourists’ photos. Great crowds mill around the moat, towers and turrets, just as they have always done. Before, it was to witness the execution of a high-ranking official on Tower Hill, or to see the ‘menagerie’ of exotic animals given to monarchs, London’s first ‘zoo’. Leopards, lions, polar bears, elephants. Today, the people come to look at themselves through their smart-phone’s lens.
The London Docks
The first kilometres take you along ornamental canals and tidy 1980s housing through the quiet and displumed district of London’s former Docklands. There are swans and coots, reeds and gardens. Ride through Wapping, with its still intact warehouses canyoning the cobbled streets. Later, there are the Royal Docks, in their time the largest inland docks in the world, their scale and immensity, even in these quiet and ship-free days, is staggering.
As you head east, London becomes distinctly grittier and industrial. Tyre shops, Thai Fighter centres, Gospel churches. Traffic thunders past like some mad cavalry charge. You’re safe on a traffic-free cycleway, but it’s not picturesque.
Rainham Marshes
After five miles, your surrounds morph into land of whispering reeds, salt marsh and abandoned military training grounds. The Rainham Marshes is an internationally recognised centre for over-wintering birds. In summer if the resident warblers, linnets and other avians aren’t singing, it will be as if you have turned the sound off on a video. For as you pause on your ride, you watch smoke and steam spiral into the air from distant industrial plants, high-speed trains race across viaducts to Paris, restless traffic heads to London, now far away and silent.
London’s rubbish has always been sent downstream. Some still goes to landfill brought downstream in barges. You ride past 150 years worth piled into an enormous green-grassed mound at Rainham. There’ll be another massive landfill in a few miles time at Mucking. But you’ll not know it as both are being transformed into country parks. On the other side of the river, steam may rise from Belvedere’s curvaceous incinerator plant which burns rubbish to create electricity.
At Purfleet, there’s a break in official NCN 13 route. Roads around here are busy and deeply unpleasant to ride on. The route I’ve mapped takes you onto a Thames-side adventure. You’ll have to ride with an adventurer’s spirit, be prepared to porter your bike up and down four short staircases, weave your way through the detritus left by high tides and at Coalhouse Fort, struggle through the narrowest of gaps. (Erected to stop the local lads from riding stolen mopeds around these Edgelands.) Much of the way is on paths - yet to be officially declared ‘shared paths’, but for all that, more bikes ride than feet walk on them. There’s no one around to tut and remonstrate.
London Cruise Ship Terminal
What you’ll have - probably all to yourself - is a sublime industrial landscape, mixed with edgeland countryside. Old wooden jetties quietly rot, railtracks curve into thickets of brambles, rogue plants, such as daffodils, banks of violets, hogweed and apples trees line the path. There’s the towering QEII bridge to ride under, 3km of high-quality wall-art (artists come from all over the UK to spray their talents on the wall at Grays), a medieval church, two historic forts, petroleum storage depots, the UK’s tallest pylons, the derricks of gantries at Tilbury and DP London Gateway. The fortunate will see a gleaming cruise ship docked at Tilbury’s London Cruise Centre, surrounded by the walls of containers, towers of tyres, and rough ground covered with the hoops of brambles. New York, Venice, Barcelona, it is not. It is the world’s end.
You pick up Route 13 again as the route heads in-land away from the Thames to Basildon. New towns, like new bricks, take time to weather and the two Essex Bs - Basildon and Billericay - are brash and filled with sheds of shopping centres and light industry. Town planners have tried to ameliorate the crudeness with ponds and parks. Generally, some good cyclepaths, which can be convoluted in their desire to avoid traffic-filled roads, take you from one side to the other.
The sandy tracks of Essex
Towards Billericay, there the Langdon Hills to ride over, which after the pleasant flatness of the Thames estuary can test the legs. And there’s some road riding too, on small lanes through woods and around edges of fields and new builds. Stay on high alert, for cars are apt to travel fast in these parts and the courtesies extended to other road users have yet to be applied by many in this part of Essex. The road sections are short, and interspersed with bridlepaths.
A canal leads you out of Chelmsford towards Maldon. The landscape clothes itself with tidy hedges, less litter, narrow and quiet lanes passing pretty, old houses, thatched and pargeted. (An old form of plaster decoration, much used in Essex and Suffolk). Hedge sparrows, peregrine falcons, rabbits. Tractors in fields.
The Thames Barges
After the old dockyards of London, the industry alongside the Thames, the lack of visual appeal of Essex’s new towns and the twisty cycle paths through them, and after the gravel-sand of Essex’s byways and grainy fields, the arrival in the very pretty sea port of Maldon, is very satisfying. Weatherboarded houses and artful brick, Thames Barges, the Blackwater estuary. There are pubs and coffee shops and people strolling, rather than racing to get from A-B. To find your bed for the night, to shower, drink a pint, and eat oysters beside the historic quay (Maldon is famous both for its oysters and salt), is the most beautiful finish to a long, memorable and sometimes challenging day.
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All the details given on this route are given in good faith. However, situations on the ground can change, so if you know of any access issues, closures, or have any thoughts and feedback on the route, please include them in the comments section below.
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