🚲 The best way to cycle from Bethnal Green to Walthamstow without traffic

You can cycle from Bethnal Green in east London to Walthamstow in north east London entirely on quiet streets and protected cycle lanes.

The route is 8.9km long (5.5 miles) and makes use of the Benthal Green LTN, Cycleway 13, Cycleway 27, the Lea Bridge Road cycle lanes and Hoe Street cycle lanes.

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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/2693866260?share_token=abj6utZ6LQSVEB6uqtzWQXZZkQunEso1PgJ8oPDIFhZ7gmlLBB&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 Bethnel Green in East London to Waltham Stow in Northeast London. This ride takes about 35 minutes and you can do the whole thing on quiet streets and protected cycle lanes. By public transport, the same journey also takes around 35 minutes. So, cycling is a great option 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 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 on Bethnal Green Road and we’re going to turn around and head down Squiries Street. This takes us north towards the Bethnal Green low traffic neighborhood where traffic levels are lower, creating a nice environment for calm cycling. Most of the traffic filters around here which make the area calm were put in by Tower Hamlet’s Council during the pandemic. Though this one here on Dorant Street looks a little bit older and works with the new ones to keep the area quiet. The new council administration in Tower Hamlets has actually talked about removing the filters, but it’s been a good few years and they’re still here. They don’t seem to have got around to it. I hope that they remain because they really do open up a lot of pleasant low traffic routes in the area both north south which we’re using today but also east west. As you can see our route today also has some off street sections including this one through Ion Square Gardens and using a cycle crossing on Colombia Road to get over Hackne Road. I’m a big fan of this next bit which goes on Goldsmith’s Row. This is a street in Hacknne and it’s completely car-free or at least this section of it is. You can see here that we pass through some bolards and there’s actually no way of driving to this part of the street. There’s another set of bolards at the end which pretty much turn it into a large cycle path. That’s different from the usual approach taken in a low traffic neighborhood where you’d usually only have one set of bolars with access retained. But the double bolars with the total removing of parking there is a nice treat and I’d love to see it in more places where possible. The current street treatment on that section actually dates from 2011 and as you can see it’s a really popular cycle route and notably it’s the site of the UK’s first cycle counter with a display showing the number of people riding through. So that claim is backed up not just by your eyes but also data on the left. By the way, we just passed the new bus gate on Wiston Road, which Hackne put in this summer. This has the effect of totally removing through traffic from the open bit of Goldmith’s Road 2, along with other streets in the area. So, this is a cycle route that is always improving. When I cycle through there in the summer, compliance from drivers was pretty poor, but hopefully that’s improved now that it’s been in for a few months. Now, Broadway Market, which we’re in now, is a really nice cycle route when it’s available, but obviously it does sometimes have a market on it, and the street is understandably closed to people riding at that time. It gets very busy when the market’s in session on weekends, and you wouldn’t want to even dismount and wheel your bike through. It is really that crowded. The best alternative is to use Sheep Lane, which runs parallel to the east of Broadway Market when the thing is in session. If you need a little bit of help finding your bearings, then you can always check out the free map of the route, which I do for all my videos. The one for this video is linked in the description and it’s still being hosted on a website called Kimoot. You can either look at it on the website or you can download a GPX file and use it on your app or device or whatever if you need a little bit of help while you are cycling. On the floor here, you’ll see an arrow with the word C27 written on it just here. That is your cue not to miss this turning into London Lane. For the next part of this route, we’re actually going to be following C27, which stands for Cycleway 27, and it’s a signposted TFL route. If you’ve ever cycled around Hackne, and wondered how to bypass Mar Street, which is really busy and horrible to cycle on, C27 and following the signs for C27 is the best way to do it. It includes this little nifty crossing of Mar Street with this weird sort of cycle cage and uh yeah, it’s a little bit wiggly and there are some bits that aren’t great which I’m going to point out, but it’s all safe and traffic free which Mar Street definitely is not. For now, though, let’s admire this cozy little alleyway that is Lime Grove, which I think is just really cute. It is a little bit on the narrow side though, so do take it easy, especially if someone’s left a load of big boxes in the way and make sure you give away 20 pedestrians. A lot of cycleway 27 is on streets like this, which are relatively quiet back streets that are quite ordinary but kept quiet by filters like this. Interestingly, this area, although it resembles a low traffic neighborhood, it’s not actually an official Hackne low traffic neighborhood. I believe the filters were actually put in peace meal bit by bit and one at a time until the whole area was actually quietened down. Someone might be able to correct me on that, but I think the effect was overall similar and generally there isn’t any through traffic on these streets, just delivery vans like that one there and people accessing properties. The carriageway is a little bit narrow in parts with all the parking, but generally it works pretty well. We’re coming up to a parallel cycle crossing here. You technically have priority over the road here, but for some reason there’s a sign on the bolard that says, “Please wait.” It’s certainly a good idea to make sure that traffic’s going to stop for you before riding over as not all motorists observe the rules there. We’re now on the Churchwell path which is a pretty narrow shared path running behind St. John Hackne Church. This is probably the weakest part of this part of cycleway 27. You can see that it is quite narrow and it’s probably not a particularly pleasant place to walk down with bikes nipping up and down it. Do take it carefully and be really courteous to pedestrians. I really really hope that Hackne has some plans to put protected lanes on Mayor Street because particularly in these sections where the trees narrow the path, this isn’t really an adequate route for the number of people who do want to cycle through Hackne Town Center. This crossing into Clapton Square is a signalized touan crossing that you can ride over and you just wait for the lights. Interestingly, it used to be a parallel crossing like a zebra crossing like the one that we went over just before we went onto the Churchwell path, but it was actually converted to a signalized crossing. In a lot of respects, that’s kind of a downgrade as you don’t get priority all the time. My understanding is that that was actually done because there are so many people riding that route that the constant stream of bikes going over the zebra crossing like this one here was actually holding up traffic on the street there including bus routes and they changed it to try and speed up traffic. That’s a really interesting situation because generally in this city we try and encourage people to walk and cycle and depprioritizing them in order to speed up traffic on the main road isn’t really a great look. I’m definitely sympathetic to the question of bus journey times. You know, they do need to be reliable and punctual and it’s important that they’re there for people to be able to use them. So, taking that all into account, I guess you could say that this does show the limits of cycle routes rooted down back streets because you’ve got this situation where if they ever get really popular like this one, then cycles actually end up being deprioritized so they don’t slow down the traffic on the main roads that the cycle routes are crossing. And I think that really shows why we need minor streets, but also main roads to be cycle routes and appropriate for cycling. In the case of main roads, that means direct protected cycle lanes that make the streets safe for all users. There’s not a lot of those in Hackne, but we’re actually going into the London Burough of Waltham Forest in about a minute or so when we get to the end of Milfield’s Park here. And uh we’re going to be seeing quite a lot of it and also what it can do. Don’t miss this turning here in Milfield’s Park. We are actually still following C-27, but the wayinding is a little bit worn in some parts, so it is easy to actually miss the signs. One thing I always check when sending you through parks is whether or not there’s lighting. And yeah, there is street lighting along the whole of the path there that we use in Milfield. So, this route should be appropriate to use at night. Although, obviously, your mileage may vary and people have different perceptions of their own personal safety. So, do take that into account if you’re planning on using this route for a commute or something like that. We want to go right here down Leebridge Road. And that means crossing the street using this touan crossing to get to the other side of this curb and the bridge where there is a cycle path which is shared over the bridge but quickly turns into our own protected cycle path heading straight down Leebridge Road. The cycle lanes on this road are what are called with flow cycle tracks. So there’s actually another lane on the opposite side of the road if you’re doing this route in the opposite direction. I’m a big fan of how Waltham Forest has used different colored tarmac on the cycle track here. The cycle tracks red whereas the pedestrian bit is in a buff color and it really makes it clear to those pedestrians when the path runs next to the cycle lane where they should be standing. You really rarely see people actually walking in the cycle path here. It’s pretty well engineered. Strangely, Waltham Forest seems to have actually stopped using the red surface on some of its newer cycle paths. I don’t know if that’s a deliberate decision or if there’s some sort of supply chain issue or maybe it’s a cost issue. I wouldn’t have thought it was that much more expensive, but actually later in the video, we’re going to be using a more recent cycle lane that Walton Forest has put in where they haven’t bothered to use a different colored tarmac. So, yeah, I’d be interested to know if anybody had the answer to why that was the case. One of the reasons this is such a well-gineered cycle lane is the junctions. Pedestrians and people walking get a green light on all arms of a junction at the same time in their own phase separate from cars. We’re just going straight on here. So the benefit for us is that there won’t be any cars turning across us. But there are even bigger benefits if you wanted to say make a right turn as you could go straight on and then immediately turn right in the same phase and you wouldn’t have to interact with any traffic. The design is absolutely fantastic for walking and cycling. The reason it doesn’t get used that often is because it requires time in the signal phases to be reallocated to people walking and cycling simply because you have to have an extra phase in the traffic lights and that can sometimes mean that people driving can have to wait a little bit longer at the lights. The design is spreading though and the London B of Newham is actually building some junctions like this along the Romford Road corridor and Camden and Islington are also planning some on York Way. They recently consulted on that. It is by far the most comfortable junction design for cycling. Um and I really hope that it continues to proliferate. There’s another one just here and it works exactly the same with a simultaneous green on all arms for pedestrians and cycles. What’s really notable about this section of the route and also the last section, which we’ll get to in a couple of minutes, is that we’re really just going in a straight line down the main road, which is kind of interesting from the perspective of a guy on YouTube showing you how to cycle from A to B. because it does make me think that if we did ever reach this high quality, high standard of cycle infrastructure throughout the whole of London. I guess this channel would be kind of redundant because you wouldn’t really need me to tell you, yeah, you just cycle down the road that goes to the place you want to go to and you get there. But I would be very happy to take redundancy in that situation. And if we ever get to a situation where the whole city is this good with protected cycle tracks like this on the main road and really quiet back streets, low traffic neighborhoods throughout all of the minor roads, then yeah, I would, you know, retire happy. Unfortunately, although a lot of progress has been made in the last decade, we are still a pretty long way off. So, I think that if you’re enjoying these videos, don’t worry. There’s going to be plenty more of them to come. And I’ll keep documenting new infrastructure as it comes out. In a way, this project is only possible because there is constantly new infrastructure being built and new things to document. And if that change ever stopped or the pace significantly slowed, then yeah, I would actually have a hard time doing a new video every week. That was interesting. Now, we’re going to make a turn at another junction in a second. Interestingly, this one is actually incomplete in my view. It’s not actually engineered in the same way as those previous ones we talked about. Three of the arms are, but not a turn that we want to do. We want to make a left turn here. And you can see we’ve got a green bike light signal there that even though the cars had a red one, we just wait here, press this button, and then we get a green, but we turn onto the main road briefly and then we join the cycle track at this dropped curb down Ho Street. This is unusual and I wonder why it’s been done that way. Walam Forest does usually tend to build those protected junctions. I wonder if it’s because that building on the corner is actually being redeveloped. Seems to be semi under construction. So, I wonder if they’re going to finish the junction properly when that is done. But, it doesn’t actually matter because you’ve got a green light, so there’s no cars coming. So, you’re on the main road there briefly, but there’ll never be any traffic. So, it does actually kind of work. These cycle lanes down Ho Street are quite new. They opened in the last year or so. As I mentioned before, they actually don’t use the signature red tarmac of Waltham Forest Cycle Tracks. I don’t really know why that is. If anybody knows, then do let me know in the comments below. They are a little bit on the narrow side at points, but that’s probably just because of the space available. They’ve managed to fit a bus lane in here as well. And I am always really impressed by the extent to which Walton Forest is always able to squeeze cycle tracks into streets where there isn’t often actually that much space and other burers would kind of flinch at it. Just a note for anybody who’s new to the channel, I post new videos pretty much every week, document new infrastructure and try and find the best routes. I do take requests. So, uh, if you like what you’re watching here, then do hit subscribe on YouTube as there’s plenty more where this came from and there’s plenty of new infrastructure in the pipeline as well, which I will be looking at as it goes live over the next few months. And if you’re a regular viewer of the channel and you look forward to Sunday night so that you can watch your London cycle video, then you can always support the channel by spreading the word and telling your friends, leaving a comment of your own. It does help boost it in the algorithm. leaving a like and if you really like it and you want to support it, then you could join those legends on the Patreon who help keep the channel running. Thanks so much to all of those of you who do that. Definitely wouldn’t be able to produce this much content without your help. So, we’ve made it all the way to Walthamto. That’s a pretty direct looking route and the map is interesting to look at, I think, because although it’s generally pretty direct the whole way, it kind of wiggles a bit to get around Hackne Town Center. You can see it there just northeast of London Fields. But then once you get into Walam Forest, it really just follows the main road because of the infrastructure available. Isn’t geography fun? Thank you everyone for watching. Please do leave a like if you enjoyed what you saw. It does help boost the video in the algorithm and help more people find it. And do let me know in the comments what you think of all that that you just saw. Would you do things differently? I’m all ears. I’m also open to requests for future videos if anyone’s got any particularly tricky routes that they’d like me to tackle. I’ll see some of you in the comments below the line and the rest of you hopefully I’ll see next week as long as you remember to hit subscribe. Thanks again and goodbye.