65km Waterlink and Wandle
Overview - Chalk and two rivers
This is a classic south-east London ride and is richly rewarding; two of London’s loveliest rivers, good traffic-free cycling paths and country tracks up in the Downs above London. There is a large variety of eye-catching landscapes to ride through, from the post-industrial to the chalk hills with their fine views over the city.
(Reviewed revised and re-ridden November 2023).
Ride practicalities
START/FINISH: Greenwich Pier/The mouth of the River Wandle, Wandsworth DISTANCE: 70km TOTAL ASCENT: 584m TERRAIN AND SURFACES: A mix of quiet suburban roads, traffic-free cycle tracks through parks and estates. The middle section is hilly and has sections of off-road bridleways which can be muddy after rain. FOOD: Cafes in Ladywell Park, Cy-Co in Coulsdon, Morden Hall Cafe (NT) PUBLIC TRANSPORT: UBER Thames Clipper Ferries serve both ends of the route (Greenwich and Putney), bikes are carried free MAINLINE TRAIN SERVICES: Greenwich and Wandsworth Town or Putney are all a short traffic-free ride away. There are plentiful train stations along the route, bikes are carried free and don’t need reservations LINKS TO OTHER RIDES: Greenwich to Hampton Court, Chiswick to Greenwich, The Lavender Fields, NCN 20, NCN 23, The Ravensbourne River Ride, Riding the Wandle
Ride Notes
Deptford Creek, is probably as quiet now as it was when the Saxons settled here over a thousand years ago. For most of its history, the creek has been a rich industrial area filled with breweries, gin distillers, potteries and tanneries. Here too, possibly on the very path you ride on, Elizabeth I knighted Francis Drake as he stepped ashore after completing the world’s first cicumnavigation. His ship, The Golden Hinde, was left to rot in the mud of the creek.
Laban Dance Studio, Deptford Creek
As you ride upstream beside the Creek, following the Waterlink Way signs, you cross over the battlefield (now the A200) where the Cornish Rebels who’d marched against Henry VII, the new Tudor monarch, were defeated in 1497. Today, it’s cars charging rather than Lord Stanley’s cavalry, and there’s a safe crossing to help you onto the next stretch of the route.
After riding two kilometres on a segregated bike path through the tower blocks of Lewisham, you arrive at another battlefield site in Ladywell Park. In 1977 between 500 National Front members and 4,000 members of the ‘All Lewisham Campaign against Racism and Fascism’ fought a pitched battle. Today, the park is one of the loveliest - and most peaceful - in south-east London and is a shining example of what a local council can do with a run down bit of ground. During the restorations at the turn of the century, the river Ravensbourne was re-routed and now meanders through wild-flower meadows and trees. In the park too is one of the Great Trees of London, an elm as well as an excellent cafe.
Save for a couple of kilometres of housing, the next ten kilometres is through a green corridor of parks, where once there were gas works and other industries. Some of the parks, such South Norwood Country Park, have a semi-wild wood feeling. Enjoy it, for the next section climbs through suburbs up to the plateau of New Addington.
South Norwood Country Park - some sections can be a little muddy after rain
For some, New Addington is everything that is wrong with British Social Housing - a sprawl of low-rise, uniform, mid-twentieth century housing. But as you ride through the ‘town’ of 10,000 people, you’ll notice the plentiful green spaces of commons and you’ll notice too, how every house has a garden. There’s a tranquility totally absent from the crowded blocks of modern housing. There are some fabulous views over London, and bubbling up behind the houses are the woods signifying the start of London’s countryside, through which we now ride.
There are hills to climb, woods to ride through on off-road tracks and small country lanes to pootle along. Horses and cattle graze in the fields, buzzards patrol the skies and apart from the odd foray into Surrey, this countryside is very much part of the London landscape.
At the hamlet of Farleigh you pass St.Mary’s, a Grade 1 listed Norman church, and as you descend off the downs back towards the city on a fast holloway, you arrive at Mayfield Lavender. In summer, the 25 acre farm is a purple sea of headily scented flowers, through which you can walk. The downs - and the hills - are not yet over, for there is a short climb up to the Oaks park, once the home of Lord Derby and where the eponymous horse race was devised over dinner. To close this section of the route, there is a fun downhill section past a golf course and at the top of the final brisk climb, you arrive at the Woodcote Estate farms - an area which has been a market garden for London for over 150 years.
Mayfield Lavender
From Woodcote to Wandsworth it’s downhill all the way. At Carshalton you join the river Wandle, perhaps London’s prettiest river. Along the way you ride on the well-signed Wandle Trail through the grand estate of Morden Hall Park with its meadows and avenues of lime trees. In the park is a manor house and an old snuff mill (NT), as well as a good cafe and an excellent second hand book shop in the stable yard. Nearby was another manor house, where Lord Nelson lived with his lover, Lady Emma Hamilton and her husband. Yes, that’s right, the three of them sharing the house.
The riding alongside the river on well made paths is enchanting. Reeds and water grasses wave in the water currents, willows and poplars line the banks. Flowers and hedgerows, fields and marshes line the route. If it were not for the odd clank of a machine or the smell of baking bread from the factories behind the fences, you’d be hard pushed to believe that you were in a city at all.
River Wandle
But it was not always so, for in the twentieth century the river was declared ‘biologically dead’ due to the pollutants in the water. There have been mills along the river for centuries - the Domesday book lists eleven corn mills - but in the nineteenth the factories and mills, including the cloth print makers of Liberty and William Morris, poured poisons into the water killing everything. Today, the Wandle, like the Ravensbourne earlier, are beaming examples of what determined councils can achieve.
As the ride nears its end, there are a few built up, low-traffic streets to ride through. At Wandsworth you arrive at Young’s Ram brewery, where there is a tap room which is a good place to quench your thirst. From there it is only a matter of one kilometre to the mouth of the river and the end of the ride. On the island in the middle of Wandle creek reached by a footbridge, stately black poplars sway in the wind and you might rest your bike against Sophie Horton’s 2003 sculpture, ’Sail’, a blue triangle much added to by rogue spray cans, whilst you watch the light sparkle on the Thames.
The Ram, Young's Wandsworth Brewery
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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