We did the London Cycling Festival family group ride. Cycling in London with young children felt like a dangerous pipedream but thanks to Cycle Islington and the London Cycling Campaign it became a well managed reality 🫶🙌
Thumbnail picture by the London Cycling Campaign 📸
https://www.instagram.com/london_cycling_campaign?igsh=Y2x3OWVkdjhobHNv
Islington Festival of Cycling – Sunday 25 May at Highbury Fields
Outbound route 🚲
https://ridewithgps.com/routes/51150685
Inbound route 🚲
https://ridewithgps.com/routes/51150683
hi it’s Matt here and I’m back because I want to talk a bit about a little all ages group ride I did in London recently with my wife six-year-old and three-year-old it was a great event organized by the London Cycling Campaign it was on a mixture of Marshall Roads closed roads and cycle lanes and it was just a lovely day so let’s get into it just do a quick hardware check i was on my Space Horse um all around my wife was on her Temple Step through Lightweight and the little ones were on their own bikes the six-year-old was on a size three and the 3-year-old was on a size two and I also packed the kids ride shotgun tow rope just in case anyone needed a little helping hand so more on that in a bit so we met up for the start of this ride on Hybrid Fields and the background to this is that Ride London was cancelled this year and that normally includes a free cycle event which is like a short loop of London on closed roads for families and younger riders so an alternative event was set up called the London Cycling Festival which was an event all across London various bodies involved um running out like the London Cycling Campaign and the Zero Emissions Network line bikes and in the case of this ride we were doing Cycllers Lington so the idea was that there’d be various sites throughout London um for this event and there’d be group rides sort of taking off and going to the sites and that kind of thing so we were headed to Hawkton where there had been a bunch of roads closed for like a 2k loop and um stalls and bike mechanics and stuff like that so we set off um to Hawkton the rout was going to be about half an hour of cycling we thought I’ll put the link in the description to the route and I honestly I I didn’t really have any idea how this was going to go there was obviously a safety side which I was conscious of but I knew it was going to be well run by the um the organizers and the volunteers that was good and in terms of any tired legs I was thinking if anyone starts to struggle could always do a bit of towing and or pushing and worse comes to the worst we get stuck down in Hawkton we can just get the overland back to Hybrid so it felt like we had some decent contingency plans in if needed
that goes past Britannia Center and down they both meet at the bottom at Hawkton Square and the bit across the bottom’s got cobbles we’ll be leaving from here to go back at 11 coming that way we’ll be going back out that way so everyone enjoy the ride once we got to Hawkton we had a bit of a cycle around the closed road loop and then we hung out in the stands for a bit before we met back up with a group and headed back to Islington so we took a slightly different route back to the one we uh came down on obviously just really at a pottering pace which took about half an hour to get back so now whilst it was a largely traffic free route there was still signs of you know the tension that goes on between motorists and cyclists in London it was a Sunday morning it was it was mega quiet and we were a relatively small group of like you know 30 to 35 people so um and we weren’t like strung out we stayed together but there was just the odd junction where the marshals sort of held traffic for maybe like 30 seconds to like a minute or so at most and you know there was a bit of honking from time to time and I think I heard somebody shouting “Get a move on,” or something like that at some point so it was just a bit of a depressing reminder that there’s still some way to go before cyclists are fully accepted on um the roads of London but it wasn’t long before we made it back to Hibbury and all in all it was a pretty epic day despite some um initial nerves about taking the little ones out having some good contingency plans in place made all the difference and we’ll definitely be doing it again
1 Comment
Liked and subscribed