🚲 A brilliant new way to cycle from City Hall to West Ham without traffic

You can cycle from City Hall in east London to West Ham entirely on quiet streets and protected cycle lanes.

The route is 3.1km long (2 miles) and makes use of the new cycle lanes through Canning Town and on the Silvertown Viaduct, plus historic backstreets.

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

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/2229237592?share_token=ax1owUKyrfMpMOl2nfKTo0jEDfnSgbC4aOqbnVRVhXWxOrkSkk&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=51.516975804561284%2C-0.21828576419061996&z=11

Hello and welcome back to London Cycle Routes. Today I’ll be showing you how to cycle from City Hall in East London to West Ham. This ride takes about 15 minutes and you can do the whole thing on quiet streets and protected cycle lanes. By public transport, the same journey takes a little longer over 20 minutes. So, cycling is a great way to make this local 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 massive 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 by the new city hall in the Royal Docks, and we’re going to turn around and head up Tidal Basin Road. There’s no cycle lanes for the very first few meters of our trip, but if you time it right with the lights, you shouldn’t have to deal with any traffic, and you’ll very quickly get onto these fantastic protected lanes on the Silvertown flyover. This bioduct is probably older than you think it is. It actually opened in 1934, making it one of the oldest urban flyovers in the UK. In the last few months, cycle lanes have been added all the way through Canning Town, stretching all the way to Cycleway 3, uh, a route into central London. And this corridor is what we’re going to be using today for the first part of our route. The protection on this section is a little bit more sparse than I probably would have wanted. I probably double the number of little protective islands, but it does actually feel pretty comfortable and it quickly turns into a full protected lane as you get into the town center bit. There are actually a lot of new cycle lanes in this area, including behind us in the opposite direction stretching down to City Airport on North Willich Road, and I hope to make videos of those soon. So, if you’re interested in seeing how they work, then do subscribe to the channel so you don’t miss them. I’m a huge fan of these lanes and I think they’re just really well done. So, congratulations to whoever rolled these out. They do turn into a shared space area just before you get to cycle way 3, which is that old blue cycle lane here. We’re actually not going to stay on cycle way 3 for long, though, and instead we’re going to use these several toum way and get under this fly over. When we get to the other side of the highway, there’s actually another new cycle lane, which I think a lot of people haven’t spotted. It’s this little two-way track alongside Mana Road, which you can see other people are also using. Doesn’t go very far, but it does lead us to a parallel crossing, which is almost faded away, but you can still see it just about on the carriageway here. That leads us in a slightly roundabout way to Molsbury Road Park, which looks a little bit sorry for itself and appears to have been annexed by pigeons. It would be lovely to see that reworked into a bit of a nicer space. I’m not sure whether there are plans to do it as part of all the development happening around here or not, but it would certainly be a good idea. The next part of the route traces its way through quiet back streets. The estates around here are actually natural low traffic neighborhoods. There’s no through traffic due to the inherent layout of the streets, which is actually pretty common for newer developments. In a second, we’re going to cut through Star Park, our second park of the day. But one thing I would say about this section of our route today, is that the carriageways and paths, particularly in the parks, could really do with some resurfacing and remedial works to fix things like drop curbs. If you look at the ground here, you can kind of see a lot of cracks. And you might be able to notice my bike bumping up and down if you look at the handlebar on the left there. This part of the route is actually partially signposted. It’s an old London Cycle Network route from the 1990s, though it was never given an official route number, but there are still little blue signs at various points, giving you subtle and actually quite easy to miss clues about which way you might want to turn. If you need a bit of extra help remembering which way to go, you could also download the free companion map of this video, which I’ll link in the YouTube description below. It’s on a website called Kimoot, and you can either use it in their app or download the GPX file, and use that standard format in whichever app you prefer. One of those blue signs I mentioned is just here, by the way, pointing us towards Ptoria Road. And there is a dropped curb, which lets us get down there. Coming up on our left at the end of this street, there’s actually another little blue sign. It’s a very little one with a picture of a bike on it. You can just about see it here on that lamp post. It’s pointing us down this alleyway. Unfortunately, there is actually a chicane installed here, which makes it inaccessible for some people to get through. Maybe if you’re on a cargo bike or adapted cycle. on the right on that lamp post as well. You might have spotted if you’re very eagle-eyed a blue sign with a bike on it, which is a sign indicating that you can cycle down there. And then there’s another sign below it saying cyclists dismount. So, I do think that whoever’s installing those signs needs to look up what they mean. Um, if you want to dismount when you go through there and you’re able to, you can obviously do that if you prefer. In Memorial Park here, you’re going to want to take this diagonal, slightly narrower path out of the options you’re presented with. Do remember that this space is shared with pedestrians. So, don’t ride too quickly and make sure you give everybody plenty of space and just be courteous to people around you. It’s nice to see the blossom out. By the way, when I did this route, Memorial Park, believe it or not, before it was a public park, used to be the football ground for the team Tempame’s Iron Works, which later changed its name to West Ham United. They played here until 1904 and were known as West Ham here for 4 years until they moved to Upton Park and they now, of course, play at the Olympic Stadium in Stratford and we’ve done plenty of cycle routes around there. If you want to check them out, do check out the map of all the different London cycle routes videos linked in the description below. Thanks to Isaac for keeping that up to date. And uh yeah, we are here at West Ham Station. That was a relatively short route today, but it’s one that I’ve wanted to do a video of for ages because that last bit through the estates has been there for a long time, but until that cycle lane was built through Canning Town, it was a very, very short route indeed. So with the help of that and also that small cycle lane on Mana Road finishing the gap that’s become reality. So great to see that it’s a pretty direct route as you can see from the map. Uh thank you for watching to the end. Do hit subscribe on the channel if you enjoy it. I post new videos every week. Please do also hit the like button if you want to help other people find the video on YouTube. It really does boost it in the algorithm and send it to more people. And thank you once again to everybody who supports the channel on Patreon. I really appreciate it. And if anybody else is feeling generous and would like to chuck money at me, then you can find the link in the description below the video. Do let me know in the comments what you think of the route. To me, the main downside is actually the poor quality of the surface in the second part going through the estate. A lot of those parks, the paths are really falling apart and could do with being resurfaced. But I actually think that with a little bit of improved way finding, this could actually be quite a nice cycle way linking West Ham to the city hall. There’s also further connections northbound of here that I’d like to do. I think it would be pretty easy to go from Canning Town to Stratford. The problem is that it requires a section of the Greenway, which is actually closed at the moment due to Temp’s waterworks. But when that’s finished, I think that this route will become even more useful and connect even bigger town centers together. And that’s not even to mention the new cycle lanes that have opened on North Willitz Road. I should mention, by the way, that I believe that as of this weekend that this video is going out, there is actually some construction work taking place on the Silvertown FL flyover for the next few months. So, uh you may have to use a cycle diversion to use that. I’m not sure if it affects this route specifically, but you can’t go the whole way through it at various points. Um, so yeah, thank you very much everyone for watching and I will see you all again next time. Goodbye.