🚲 The best way to cycle from Walworth to Clapham

You can cycle from Walworth in south London to Clapham, entirely on quiet streets and protected cycle lanes.

The route is 6km long (3.7 miles) and makes use of the Walworth and Oval Low traffic neighbourhoods, as well as the route of Cycleway 5.

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, you can also contribute to the London Cycle Routes Patreon below. It really helps keep the channel going: http://patreon.com/londoncycleroutes

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/1362536934?ref=wtd&share_token=aV8ZNYRFxd66bTY711Lir9J7eecNp1spf4eOxdcWi0W495K09M

And you can find a viewer-created and maintained map of all the London Cycle Routes videos here: https://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=51.516975804561284%2C-0.21828576419061996&z=11

Hello and welcome back to London cycle routes today I’ll be showing you how to cycle from Walworth in South London to Clapham this ride takes about 20 minutes and you can do the whole thing on quiet streets and protected cycle Lanes by public transport the same Journey takes between 25 minutes and

Half an hour so it makes a lot of sense to cycle this route 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 as well you can find a link in the description below the video all right let’s get going so we’re starting on the corner of Brandon Street and Browning Street in Walworth and we’re going to Head West

Right towards Walworth Road which is the main High Street in this town this first section of the route is dead quiet and you’ll see why that is when we get a little bit further down there were actually some planters here and no entry signs blocking off the road to cars

Which keeps it all really really quiet note the traffic light here which is green if it were red we’d have to wait there and it helps us cross Walworth Road onto the other side here it’s a similar story on on the western side of wallworth road it’s all really quiet and

It’s for the same reason and that’s because the area that we’re in is actually a southern Council low traffic neighborhood so through traffic has basically been removed from the streets around here with a load of strategic road closures sometimes that means Planters like the ones we saw a second

Ago sometimes it means bards like other physical road closures and sometimes it can mean signage like this bus gate coming up here you see this blue sign it says buses and Cycles only so that stops cars but it allows a bus route to pass through here and if you think about it

That’s totally compatible with having a sort of pleasant low trffic cycle route because even a frequent bus route might have a bus you know one every 3 minutes or 4 minutes or something like that but one car going down a street every three or 4 minutes that’s a very low traffic

Street so actually having that bus throughout through there it really doesn’t make it a worst place to cycle um and it’s also thing that we don’t talk about enough I think these low traffic neighborhoods they can often be a positive if they’re designed right they can be a positive for public

Transport as they can include measures like that bus priority measures which can give people faster Journeys if they’re taking the bus so it’s not just about walking and cycling and making the place nicer but it’s also about improving reliability of public transport and you can see how just how

Quiet the streets around here are and believe it or not this was actually filmed at rush hour on a week day so this is about as busy as it gets now we’re going to cut right here through Kennington Park and a very specific part of Kennington Park this is actually

Called the midnight path and the reason for that is that the rest of Kennington Park is closed off at sundown but this midnight path is open at all hours 24 hours so there’s always a 24-hour cycle route to cut through here hence the name but next there’s a bit coming up that

I’m really not that sure about so so we’ve got this great protected cycle Lane here it’s separated from Kennington par Road by step but we’re actually going to have to turn right and as you can probably guess this is quite tricky so what I’m going to do is I’m going to

Go into the bus lane for a bit which has no traffic in it and then I’m going to wait for a gap in the traffic I’m going to turn I’m just going to sit here for a second while the traffic moves out and then I’m going to go across in the Gap

And turn into McGee Street now that right turn is really not ideal deal at all and there are a couple of alternatives to what I did there one is that you could use the protected cycle line on the other side of the street and you’d be cycling the wrong way down that

Cycle Lane it’s probably not a good idea I don’t really recommend it another is that you could have kept going until you got to the junction um you know about 30 seconds later and you could have basically done a u-turn at that Junction it’s a bit fiddly probably wouldn’t do

That um uh another is that you could use The Pedestrian Crossing Dismount and simply walk your bike for that section which is a shame because there’s a good protected cycle L there I think what I did is probably the right thing it’s certainly the legal thing to do um you

Know McGee Street is no entry except for Cycles but it’s not great I’d be really interested to uh hear people’s opinions of how you deal with Crossings like that I think ideally if you were to fix this you’d put a two-way cycle track like the one we’re on now actually on the other

Side of the road so people would be able to access that street without turning across traffic I think really when a road gets as wide as Kennington Park Road like that you really do need to have two-way tracks ideally on both sides but certainly on one side and have

That side accessible from all side streets now if you’re familiar with the uh the geography of the root with toing or if you just looked carefully at the map at the beginning you’ll see that really ideally we would have loved to have just gone straight down down

Kennington Park Road which is the A3 um and that would have taken us directly to Clapham and in fact there is technically a signed cycle route down there there’s cycle Super Highway 7 in air quotes um unfortunately it mostly lacks infrastructure for most of the way so

It’s mostly just paint on the road and it’s quite a big uh big road so it’s not sort of road that most people would like to cycle on without infrastructure so what we’re doing at the moment is we’re actually picking a route through back streets that pretty much parallels the

A3 most of this route which is pretty direct uh there are a few corners but it’s pretty direct is through low traffic neighborhoods or streets that have been filtered and you can see just how many people there are riding bikes here there are probably about 10 people

On bikes that we pass for every person we pass in a car I think that’s a fair assessment it really is at this time in the rush hour on a normal weekday in this part of London this is really the main uh mode of Transport that’s kind of

The mix of uh of different transports that you get you see at the lights there there’s sort of about five people on a bike one car same in this direction now the backst street route that we’re following is called Cycle Way 5 and uh you can actually follow it

Without a map all you need to do is watch out for those green and blue signs and the markings on the road with arrows that will basically point you in the right direction but if you do feel that you need extra help finding your way then don’t forget you can always

Download a map of the root in the description below the video it’s a link to a website called Kut and it will give you a GPS GPX map of uh the directions you need to go and you should be able to load that onto whatever app or device

You choose to use but as I say the way finding on cych Wave 5 is actually pretty good you can see it says C5 on the floor right there and actually once we’re on to Lal Lane here it’s pretty much just straight it’s actually quite fast now Lal Lane and this turns

Later into Lal rise is actually an interesting street whenever I’ve been down here it’s this quiet and don’t forget this is the morning rush hour and there’s plenty of people riding bikes past us you can just see just how popular a psyo rout it actually is but I

Have been told by people who ride down here here in the evening rush hour that it can actually get a little bit busier especially when there’s disruption on nearby roads and drivers decide to go down here to bypass the queuing now that is possible for them to do because this

Isn’t actually a low trffic neighborhood it does have some through routs for cars still through it um there is one big closure at the end which eliminates most of the through traffic and we’ll get to that in a second it’s over a Railway Bridge but I think Lambo Council should

Really finish the job around here and close the remaining through routes and make this a proper watertight low traffic neighborhood if that’s really a problem in the evening Rush Hour as some people say it is and uh that closure that we were talking about is just here

You can see these no entry signs on the Railway Bridge and there are similar no entry signs on the other side as well so this is effectively a filter interestingly the name Lal is not actually derived from Lal in lakir and Scot land place that you might be

Familiar with if you know your UK geography well it’s actually named after Lark Hall which was a St home in the area back in the day another point of historical interest on this street is this slightly larger building with a arched windows on our right that was the claen dispensary which provided Medical

Care to the poor it was built in 1854 and on our right is an excellent pub called the bread and Roses believe it or not that’s I think the only Trade union owned Pub in the country it’s run by the local Trade Union Council it’s also pretty good value the pints aren’t too

Expensive and as of 2023 you can get a veggie hot dog there for £550 which I think is pretty good as far as pub food goes considering how much you can pay in some establishments these days this section of the route is reasonably quiet although it does suffer from some

Problems with through traffic especially on roads like this ven street where the parking makes the carriageway very very narrow ideally on streets like this I think you’d only have parking on one side of the road as it does make it quite difficult to get past especially

When there’s a car coming the other way ven street by the way was named after John V Reverend John ven of the Evangelical Clapham sect who preached in the church ahead of us there and his grandson also called John then invented the thenen diagram which you’ll probably

Be familiar with but we have made it right to claen and uh thanks so much for watching that guys make sure you hit subscribe if you haven’t already done so and uh I do post videos like this every single week and I’ve got a pretty good

Streak going as well I haven’t missed a week in a while thanks again so much to everyone who supports the channel on patreon if you’d also like to contribute as well you can find a link in the description below the video video thank you to those of you who already do so

And I’d love to hear from you in the comments about what you think of the video particularly about that weird right turn and uh also what sort of roots you’d like to see in future videos that kind of thing let me know below and I will see you guys all next time