🚲 London’s hidden traffic-free riverside cycle: Kent House to Catford

You can cycle from Kent House in south east London to Catford entirely on quiet streets and protected cycle lanes.

The route is 4.3km long (2.7 miles) and makes use of the Waterlink Way, also signposted as Cycleway 18.

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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/2654169795?share_token=axpWfp7qQYMP5i7iROHdFLzg9oA27GzBLw49a8biuczNxpsAjv&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=51.50521349609208%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=51.516975804561284%2C-0.21828576419061996&z=11

Hello and welcome back to London Cycle Roots. Today I’ll be showing you how to cycle from Kent House station in southeast London up to Catford along a beautiful riverside path. This ride takes under 20 minutes and you can do the whole thing on quiet streets and protected cycle paths. By public transport, the same journey takes more like half an hour. So, as well as being a beautiful leisure ride, this is also a sensible commuter route, too. 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 everyone 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 by Kent House station. If you don’t know it, it’s between Penge and Beckenham in Southeast London. You can ride on the shared path here. Note the little blue signs, but uh I’m just going to go on the carriageway and then use this crossing. I don’t really like the short section on the pavement here, but it is a neat way to get you over to Oldersme Road without having to cycle on the main road. Olders Road itself is generally pretty quiet. As you can see, we’re not running into any cars here. For this first stretch of the route, we are running on streets, but is going to take us to a pretty lovely riverside path, which is part of a route called the Waterlink Way. This cuts its way through Southeast London, following a couple of different rivers, mostly the Ravensborn, but also the Pool River, which we’re going to encounter in a few minutes. There is a school on the left here. So I wouldn’t be surprised if there was a bit more traffic here at pickup and drop off times. Maybe Brmley Council could consider putting in a school street on Aldersme to tame traffic around those times. Some thought has clearly been given to kids who want to cycle to school though, which is I’m pretty sure why we’re enjoying this quite good if rather short section of protected cycle path and the safe zra crossing we just used to get onto this riverside path here. This first section of the riverside path is a little bit dingy. Don’t worry, it does get a lot nicer. The pool river runs on our right there, past the trees, and we’ve got some playing fields on the left. Although it’s not very wide, there are actually street lights here. You can see one here, and they’re actually every few meters. So, the path should be illuminated at night, which is a useful thing to know for anybody thinking of using this route as a commuter route, particularly in the winter months when it does get dark quite early in this country. So, on your way back from the office, you don’t want to be riding in pitch black. One feature of this path is the little white line down the middle, which is meant to separate pedestrians and cycles, but it’s so faded that realistically nobody’s going to be using the correct side. So, I would just treat this path as a completely shared path and yield to pedestrians when you need to. You now turn on to the interestingly named Kangi Bridge Road. I’m assuming the bridge refers to the crossing of the pool river that we just came across. Either that or the nearby railway. I couldn’t find any information about it actually, so if you know, please do let me know as I’d be interested. I did look at old Victorian street maps of the area and they didn’t seem to have a bridge on them either. So, I don’t know exactly what’s going on. This bit of the route goes through an industrial estate and some effort has been made to make it appropriate for cycling. You can see the cycle symbols on the ground and I’m using this shared pavement which sometimes looks a bit like a cycle path but is mostly just a pavement. You’d probably be mostly fine cycling on the carriageway here as well as traffic here is pretty low as it’s a culdeac. But being an industrial estate, you will sometimes run into things like lorries occasionally. So, it’s nice to have the option either way. And as you can see, I’ve made use of both at different points, particularly when the shed pavement becomes a little bit silly. We’re going to turn off in a second. And it’s easy to remember where you need to do so as it’s the big sign for Lower Sydnam station just on the right here. I could have started this route from Sydnam, which is a more recognizable destination than Kent House, which I don’t think many people know about, but I thought I’d show you the southern end of the route as well. After weaving through the car park of the station, you briefly find yourself along another path, which isn’t particularly nice either, although I like the art on the walls. And there is of course street lighting here as well which is a good thing to make note of. It is only a short path though and you quickly find yourself emerging onto another culde-sac that is Fambridge Close. This street should be really clear although unfortunately it does have deregulated parking on it. So there’s quite a lot of cars being stored in the carriage way which does block sight lines a little bit. You then need to work your way through a barrier outside the pub and then there’s a crossing of the road to get to the next and really nice bit of the river path. Unfortunately, the crossing isn’t so good. It’s just an informal crossing and you need to use the protected islands like this to wait for a gap in the traffic and then head into Riverview Walk where we cross the pool river again on this rather lovely bridge under a willow tree. Note again that there are again street lights here. So this route does still work at night. The river runs to the left of you here and very pleasant it is too. The pool is a tributary of the probably better known river raven spawn which we’ll be getting to in a bit. Interestingly it’s basically the reason why this land is not developed and has been given over to a park and that reason is that it is a flood plane. up here is actually the confluence of the pool and the Ravens spawn where the two rivers meet and I suspect that’s probably why there’s a large group of kids there. They might be on a school trip coming to look at confluence which is the sort of thing that you do learn in geography. That’s a complete guess. I didn’t ask them why they were there. Another claim to fame for the pool is that former mayor Boris Johnson once fell into it in 2009 back when he was doing his clown act. This section of the path is absolutely lovely. I’m editing and publishing this video on a very cold day in October and uh as you can see I did obviously film this one in the summer and I can pretty much feel the vitamin D just by looking at the footage. It is really quite a nice place to come in the summer. The wayinding on this route is pretty decent. You can see there’s the odd blue sign on lamposts like there and there pointing you in the right direction. But uh if you do need a little bit of extra help beyond this video, you can always download the free map of the route that I do uh linked in the description below the video. If you’re enjoying the ride, please do leave a like. It really does help other people find the video in YouTube’s algorithm. And if you’re new to the channel, make sure you hit subscribe as I post new routes like this every week, mostly checking out new cycle infrastructure in London and stitching together routes that already exist. always avoiding traffic wherever possible. I’m hoping to make a return to this path fairly soon as it connects really well with some new infrastructure that is going in north of here around Deepford. Uh there’s new protected cycle lanes being built on Depford Church Street. They will connect really nicely with this path and hopefully make a continuous route through to all sorts of destinations that you couldn’t get to before without braving heavy traffic. So, I’ll definitely be making some videos of those when those lanes are complete. Now, we’re crossing the river again, and there’s actually a sign on that bridge asking people on bikes to dismount. So, I did that there. For anyone who can’t dismount, I don’t think that there’s actually a physical reason why you can’t cycle over there. Although, the arch of the bridge is a little bit on the steep side, and it is pretty narrow as well. So, you might just want to take that into account. In a second, we’ll be crossing into what’s known as the Pool River Linear Park. Uh, it’s just over this bridge around the corner here. I have to say, I think it’s a strange name as by this point, the river here is very much the river Ravensborn. As as we know, the Pool River joined the Ravensborn a little bit further back from here. There’s a very picturesque section just here running under the railway bridge which fortunately isn’t too narrow which is kind of unusual for when you have to pass under a railway bridge on a riverside walk. So yeah, well play to anyone who did that. Now we’re basically in Catford, our final destination, but I just want to show you how to get over this road safely. You can go straight into the car park when you exit the Riverwalk, but I prefer to use this little ramp here which goes onto this path. You can see the path used to be colored green, but the surface has washed off. That was the color that cycle lanes used to be in London. But anyway, it leads to this little archway under Catford Road and puts you out right next to Catford Bridge Station. Catford station is just over the street there on the left. So, you get two stations for the price of one. And we’re here. Thanks so much for watching that, guys. Hope you enjoyed it. It’s a kind of an interesting route cuz it’s part commuter route. It genuinely does work as a commuter route. None of that park is closed at night. It’s all open 24/7. And it is also lit. Uh but it’s also nice enough that you’d probably just want to do that for a ride, particularly on a nice day like the day that this was filmed. I hope that anybody who is getting the autuminal/winter blues uh is rejuvenated by watching this. And uh yeah, let me know in the comments what you think of that. Would you take a different route? And uh please do leave a like, hit subscribe, and thank you once again to everyone who supports the channel on Patreon. Really appreciate it. If anyone else wants to throw money at me by way of thanks, then the link is in the description below the video and you can support the channel there. I’ll see you all again next time and goodbye.