🚲 The best way to cycle from Borough to Peckham without traffic

You can cycle from Borough to Peckham in south London entirely on quiet streets and protected cycle lanes.

The route is 5km long (3.1 miles) and makes use of Cycleway 10, Cycleway 35 and the Surrey Canal Walk

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You can see a digital map of the route and download a GPS/GPX file to use on whatever device or app you want here:

https://www.komoot.com/tour/2400928613?share_token=aKxOdNirvRwiThRz8iWFdDD7meVlK3ziqwPxMGetP3xTz6u9pr&ref=wtd

And you can find a viewer-created and maintained map of all the London Cycle Routes videos here:

https://www.google.com/maps/d/u/0/viewer?mid=1h9Hxm57fPvZmcuSXajM_Wu0G0s6f_bs&ll=51.505213496092054%2C-0.1285238120117249&z=12

I also highly recommend the Safe Cycle London map for route planning, which is compiled by @SafeCycleLDN on twitter:

https://www.google.com/maps/d/viewer?mid=1XlpvN9R-Wg7qZHyezO8y-eVlftr4e0WX&hl=en&ll=0%2C0&z=12

Hello and welcome back to London Cycle Roots. Today I’ll be showing you how to cycle from Burough on the edge of South Central London to Peekom in South London. This ride takes just 18 minutes and you can do the whole thing on quiet streets and protected cycle lanes. By public transport, the same journey takes between half an hour and 40 minutes. So, cycling is a really quick way to make this trip. If you find this video useful or you just enjoy watching it, then please don’t forget to subscribe to the channel as I try to post new videos just like it every week. I’d also like to say a huge thank you to everybody who supports the channel on Patreon. If you’d like to contribute too, then you can find a link in the description below the video. All right, let’s get going. So, we’re starting on Burough High Street opposite the tube station and we’re going to turn around and we’re going to go through this little pocket park on Tabard Street. It’s quite easy to miss, but there’s actually a pretty good cycle crossing here over Long Lane, which gets us onto the other side of Tabard Street and towards cycleway 10, which we’re going to be using for some of our journey today. This street is generally really quiet and has very little traffic on it. But in this direction, you also benefit from a separate protected cycle lane for extra comfort, which we’re using now. You can follow the C10 signs for the first bit of this journey if you need a bit of extra help way finding. Tabard Street is incidentally named after the Tabard Inn, which for centuries stood more or less where we started this video. It was famous for accommodating travelers making the trip down to do and Canterbury and is mentioned in Cort’s Canterbury Tales. That makes sense because Tabar Street, previously known as Kent Street, was actually the ancient thoroughare down to the Kent coast. The original inn either burned down in the Great Fire of London or was pulled down to make a fire break. Now, take a look at what someone’s done to this bolard on the right here. Uh, someone went DIY and has covered it in yellow stripes. Uh, this actually seems like a pretty good idea to me. That bard is in the middle of the path and it’s probably pretty tricky to see at night. I hope whoever did that wasn’t motivated to do it by a nasty accident. Uh, make sure that you watch out for it, of course, especially at night. There’s another cycle crossing here. It works nicely, but you briefly share the pavement with pedestrians on the other side of the street here. So, do just watch out for people walking and don’t ride too quickly over it. Doing this route on a sunny day like today really reminds me that cycleway 10 is probably one of my favorite places to ride in London. The infrastructure is decent sort, but the main thing is how it weaves its way through. Just quite an interesting and scenic part of London. On the right here is the Victoria Pub. And if you’re doing this as a leisure ride, it’s a nice place to stop for a pint. It actually specializes in traditional cider. They’ve got a bunch of them on the bar. Just a little warning about Willow Walk here. It’s always quiet enough to ride down, but there is an industrial estate off to the side here. You can see a few industrial buildings in fact here. And uh it does sometimes get a little bit busier on weekdays with commercial vehicles. So, do just bear that in mind. It’s probably the least fun bit to ride down, but it is generally basically fine as well. You can see that there’s a little queue of vehicles here at the end of the street. But one of the features of this route and its infrastructure is that there’s a cycle early start signal here. So the traffic light here was actually green for bikes ahead of it being green for cars, which gives you a little bit of a head start to get across the junction. Don’t miss this right turn here. There is a little green and blue sign, but it’s quite easy to miss. you turn into Chaucser Drive, which having learned that fact about the Tabardin and the old route to Kent and the Canterbury Tales, actually that name makes a lot more sense to me. Chaucser Drive, of course, Chaucser, the author of the Canterbury Tales. There’s another easy to miss right here. It’s just here. Unfortunately, the road doesn’t have a name, but there is a green and blue sign. It’s just in front of this apartment building here. And uh you just wait for a gap in the traffic and then cross the street and use the shared pavement for a brief period along Rolls Road to get yourself onto Cooper’s Road. Or uh you could just do what the guy in front of us did and cycle on the main road briefly if you’re okay with that. Cooper’s Road is a little bit of a cut through for cars as you can see and could probably benefit from a filter to quieten it down. It’s a little bit narrow from the parking too, but we’re only on it for a second before we turn into Mori Place. And we use that to get to a cycle crossing over the El Kent Road here. One thing that I quite like about this route is that although it uses back streets, it’s actually really, really straight. You probably saw on the map at the beginning that yeah, it pretty much goes directly from Boa to Peekom. And that’s probably one of the reasons why it’s such a timesaver. But as you can see from the video, it’s not just quick, it’s also really just quite nice. I think if this was my commute, it would definitely be one that I would be looking forward to all day. Now, just coming up, we’ve got our third right turn that’s easy to miss, that you don’t want to miss, and that is leading into the Surrey Canal Walk. You could keep following the signs for cycle way 35 here. You can see there’s a green and blue one on that lamp post, and that’s leading you up ahead. and taking a slightly different route, but we’re going to stick to the Surrey Canal Walk. I think the C35 route is more on quieter streets. I say quieter, some of them are quieter than others. There’s a little bit of cycle track there, too. And it’s a perfectly fine route to follow, but I think most people would probably prefer the Surrey Canal Walk, which is this nice, pretty wide shared path, which runs directly into the center of Peekom. Um, as the name suggests, it did used to be a canal until the 70s when it was filled in and turned into a canal path. Um, it has plenty of street lighting, so if you’re doing this in the winter, should be totally fine to do it. And even today on this quite sunny day, it’s not actually that busy. Um, which is always a good thing when it comes to shared paths cuz if they get too busy, they can be a little bit of a nightmare to cycle down like a real canal. Canal toe paths are not really great for cycling down for that reason. But this one has plenty of space and you can see all the old canal bridges up ahead. Of course, remember it is shared with pedestrians and just give everyone priority when they’re walking down here and don’t ride too quickly. But generally, I’d say this is probably the best way to go. And it is a nice ride. If you want to check out the C35 version of this route, um I have actually used this section of C-35 in other videos and you can find it by going to the map of all the different London cycle routes videos which is in the description. It’s linked there and you can just look at the parallel route to this one. It runs next to it. But I kind of like this one. C35 joins us again here. By the way, as we approach Peekom Square, which I usually call Peckham Library Square, cuz that’s Peekom Library on the left. We’re not going to end the video here, though. We’re just going to go a little bit deeper into Peekom cuz there’s actually a pretty decent way to do it. Um, as you come out of Peekom Square, there’s actually a Tucan crossing. Um, make sure that you go down the ramp, which is this side of there. There are some steps there, and you don’t want to cycle down the steps. That’s not really a good idea. But we take the two crossing over here and there’s actually a uh a contraflow cycle lane of sorts running against the one way here. Um it’s in a really terrible state of repair. You can see that buses basically occasionally knock it and have gradually destroyed it. Um there are actually plans from S Council to redo this and slightly improve it. The main problem is when you’re going in the opposite direction, you get stuck behind a bus. Also, pedestrians tend to walk out into the contraflow. Plus, it’s in a pretty poor state of repair as I mentioned, but overall it’s basically fine. That then puts you onto Ry Lane proper. And this has got a bus gate on it. It’s buses and cycles only. There is some loading allowed by the way, so you might see the occasional van, but as you can see, it’s generally a bit of a joy to ride down. This was fully pedestrianized or pedestrians and cycles uh for about a year during the pandemic, I think. And that was pretty lovely, too. But I can totally see why they wanted the buses to stop outside Ry Lane station just for interchange for passengers. Um I do hope in the longer term though that they make the pavements a bit wider as they can get a bit crowded and it’s a little bit silly to have such narrow pavements on a street where there’s so much empty space. They could put a little bit of greenery in as well uh too just to make it, you know, sing a little bit. But generally really great cycle route. Uh soon hopefully we’ll be able to continue this route further down uh towards Catford when uh some future sections of C-35 are built. There are some pretty exciting plans to sort out the gyatory down there ahead of us. But for now, we’re going to end it here at the bottom of Ry Lane or at the top of Peekom Rye Common, whatever you prefer to think of that spot as. And yeah, um a really nice route and as you can see from the map, as I mentioned, pretty direct. Uh yeah, sure it’s not quite as direct as the old Ken Road, but yeah, it’s more or less um a direct angle from Boa down to Peekom. Uh so I really hope you guys enjoyed that. If you like what we’re doing on the channel, please do hit subscribe as I try and post new videos every week. And uh please do leave a like as it helps other people find the video. And if you really like what we’re doing, you can always throw money at me on the Patreon. Thank you so much to those of you who already do that and help keep the channel going. Uh there’s a link in the description for those of you who want to do that. Please do let me know in the comments what you think, particularly whether you would use the C35 route or whether you would use the sorry canal route. I know people have different preferences for this stuff. Some people have a much lower tolerance for shared space, but I think that’s a pretty good one as far as they go. So, let me know in the comments and let’s hear what you guys think of it all. Thanks for watching and I’ll see you guys again next time. Goodbye.