🚲 Cycling from Beckton to Royal Docks just got much easier

You can cycle from Beckton to Royal Dock in east London entirely on quiet streets and protected cycle lanes.

The route is 3.5km long (2.2 miles) and makes use of the newly refurbished Beckton Corridor and cycle lanes on North Woolwich Road.

If you find this video useful or you just enjoy watching it please remember to subscribe to the channel and hit the bell icon so you’re alerted to new videos, as I try to post new ones like it every week.

And if you like what the channel is doing and want to support it, you can also contribute to the London Cycle Routes Patreon below. It really helps keep the channel going:

http://patreon.com/londoncycleroutes

The Newham Cyclists campaign on the Thames Water Greenway closure is here

Greenway: Flushed Away!

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/2701226255?share_token=arvYjPI238QgC4rcMM2D2Ao9H4e3rQCCEI381IM1nOXaqST3eV&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=51.516975804561255%2C-0.21828576419061996&z=12

Hello and welcome back to London Cycle Routes. Today I’ll be showing you how to cycle from Beckton in East London to the Royal Docks. This ride takes less than 15 minutes and you can do the whole thing on quiet streets and protected cycle lanes. By public transport, the same journey takes over half an hour. So cycling is a great 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 Tollgate Road by Beckton Asda, and we’re going to take this cycle path southbound. This path was recently rebuilt and is quite nicely done, keeping us separate from both cars and pedestrians. It’s one of a few improvements made around here recently by New Council, another of which is this crossing with separate sides for people on foot and people on bikes. I really like that approach compared to just mixing everyone in. But as you saw, not everyone quite gets which side they’re supposed to use. One solution to that is actually in effect on this path here where they’ve made really good use of different colored tarmac to indicate the difference between the cycle path and the pedestrian bit. And as you can see, it’s working really well. There’s actually not a single person standing in the cycle path for the whole of this length despite the path being quite busy. Aside from being more practical, I think visually it just looks a lot better too with that buff surface providing a little bit of contrast rather than having the whole thing as asphalt. But yeah, importantly, everyone who isn’t a dog is standing on the correct side of the path, which makes things easier for everybody. This is the Beckton corridor, recently renovated by New Council, and it’s a huge improvement on what was here before. There is lighting and it looks like CCTV the whole way down it which is helpful for when it gets a bit darker in the winter months. I hope that the council plans to improve further sections along here because they’ve done a really excellent job with that bit and it connects really nicely at both ends. At the end we started at there was some improved cycle paths around the DLR station and the Asda which are of course destinations for people to visit in and of themselves. In fact, one of the use cases I had in mind while filming this route was, what if you lived in one of the new flats in the new Royal Docks development and wanted to go to the big Asda at Beckton? Well, it’s about a 13-minute cycle. And at the other end, we’ll see some brilliant new cycle lanes along North Willich Road all the way to Royal Docks. And you’d be surprised how much shopping you can get into a Pia bag. It’s actually a really not just doable but attractive journey to make. I’d love to see the separate path design on the upgraded bit of the corridor rolled out not just on the rest of the corridor but to other similar paths across London. I think it really is the right way to do it. I know that new cyclists the group are pushing for the design to be adopted on the greenway which is definitely a good place to start. The greenway, by the way, which temps water will be closing for three years without a safe alternative route despite 3,000 people a day relying on it to get to work. Newm cyclists are running a great campaign pushing Temp’s Water and the council to provide a safe alternative and they need your help. So, I’ll link to the campaign in the description so you can sign up. It’s really important, especially if you cycle in East London. A quick safety note about the street that we just crossed. By the way, it looks quiet, but drivers do have a habit of putting their foot down on it, so just make sure you’re careful and give way. Equally, as you are riding past the rowing club here, just make sure that nobody hits you in the head with an ore, which seemed like a real possibility when I was coming through. We are riding alongside the Royal Albert Dock, named after Queen Victoria’s husband. And on the other side of Conor Bridge here, there is the Royal Victoria Dock, named after the Queen herself. You can cycle all along the dock side, which is pretty cool. If we went straight ahead, we’d end up at City Hall, but we’re not going to do that. We’re going to turn up onto the pedestrian and cycles arm of Connell Bridge, which is going to take us right over the dock. Remember that this bridge is shared with pedestrians and isn’t super wide, so do be courteous when using it and give priority to people on foot. To our left, past that high security fence is actually London City Airport and you can very often see and especially here planes taking off and landing here. As you approach along the dock side, this shared path very quickly comes to a crossing. Make sure you check both ways before you use it. You do have priority, but motorists don’t always stop. And then on the other side of the road, it becomes a proper cycle lane. This North Witch Road corridor opened earlier this year and it really is fantastic. At the moment, we’re on a birectional cycle lane, but quickly you cross the road and it turns into with flow cycle tracks on either side of the street. Apart from the high quality of the lanes themselves, one lovely feature of this scheme is the amount of greenery and public realm that’s been wrapped into it. And it’s great to see that it doesn’t just look good in the summer. It also looks nice and welcoming in chilly late November, which is really important when you live in a country where it’s pretty cold and wet a lot of the time to me. There’s also just something really cool about the DLR running on an elevated concrete vio next to the road. I don’t know what it is. It just sort of feels futuristic and utopian. As of a couple of weeks ago, these cycle lanes are now connected via the Silvertown vio through Canning Town as well. And I’ll be doing a video showing the whole corridor open over the next few weeks. Make sure you are subscribed so that you see that. It’s a really, really impressive run that didn’t exist at all until this year and is now one of the best cycle routes in London. I think I do think it is time that we start talking about Newm as one of the better London burers for this stuff as they are really delivering a lot of really high quality projects. We’re not going that way today though. We’re actually turning off left into Royal Crest Avenue to end up in the center of the Royal Warf development which is part of the wider Royal Docks area which has seen a lot of new homes built recently. I’d be interested to know what people think of this new development here. It doesn’t look architecturally like anything particularly special to me, but neither does it look particularly bad. And they’ve clearly crammed a lot of flats in here and actually some not bad public realm, too. This square looks reasonably good and a lot better than things that you see in other new developments. But anyway, yeah, as you can see, cycling from this new development here, all these homes up to Beckton Asda is a really, really attractive proposition. We did the whole thing without interacting with any traffic. It was on pretty nicely done paths and it took under 15 minutes. I think it took me about 13 minutes in total. So, yeah, it’s a really good way to make the trip. And in fact, by DLR, it’s not actually very good. Although you are next to a DLR station when you start and next to a DLR station when you finish, they’re actually on different branches of the DLR. So you have to go out west, change, and then come back. So it’s not super convenient. There is a bus, but takes longer than the bike. As I say, I have more videos coming of new infrastructure in this and other areas of London. So do hit subscribe if you want to see that. And I’m also planning to do another endofear video this year rounding up all the infrastructure that we got this year and what we can expect next year too. Some of it is really good news, some of it less. So, so make sure you’re subbed if you’re not already as you won’t want to miss that. Thank you once again to everybody who supports London Cycle Routt on Patreon. It wouldn’t be able to exist without you. And if anyone else gets a lot out of this channel and fancies chipping in to support it, then you can find a link to the Patreon in the description below the video. Let me know what you think of the route in the comments below. I will see some of you below the line and the rest of you I’ll see next week. Goodbye.