🚲 A lovely easy way to cycle from Catford to Lewisham without traffic

You can cycle from Catford in south east London to Lewisham entirely on quiet streets and protected cycle lanes.

The route is 2.8km long (1.7 miles) and makes use of Cycleway 18 or the Waterlink Way.

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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/2456992645?share_token=aJPEYy5CYSkgshNkMuCoJY7eivSM5jlrkOIuOFaKIDRjYckqq5&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=0%2C0&z=12

Hello and welcome back to London Cycle Roots. Today I’ll be showing you how to cycle from Catford in Southeast London to Lewisham just up the road. This ride takes just 10 minutes and you can do the whole thing on quiet streets and protected cycle lanes. By public transport, the same journey takes around the same amount of time. 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 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 Catford Railway Station and we’re going to turn around and head down Aiden Mall Road and immediately pass Catford Bridge Railway Station as well, which is on the other side of the street. The first section of our route today uses Aiden Moore Road to head north. It’s a culdeac, so it naturally doesn’t have any through traffic on it, and you can expect it to be really quiet and a decent environment to cycle on. Until quite recently, this area was the site of the Catford Greyhound Racing Stadium, which has since been redeveloped into quite a large housing development. As you can see, for our purposes, the public realm is pretty decent with through traffic designed out and no parking allowed on this street. For a site that’s hemmed in by two railways on either side, it’s also pretty permeable with connections to the north and to the west onto shared cycle paths through Lady Well Fields, which we’ll be using in a moment. Just coming up here, you can see the transition onto the shared path is done quite nicely with bolards keeping traffic out, but otherwise a direct connection into the park. One of the advantages of going this way rather than turning into the park earlier is also that it avoids a pretty big hill. Uh this way is perfectly flat. This park is also open 24 hours and as you can see has street lighting along the paths. So there shouldn’t be an issue with using this route after dark or if you’re commuting in the winter for example. Uh do just remember though that the paths are shared with pedestrians and are sometimes of moderate width. So, please do ride considerately when you’re in there. Once you take the bridge over the river and exit the park, you’ll find yourself on Malon’s Road. This is a similar situation to the street we started on. It’s a culdeac ending at the park, so there’s no through traffic on it. The only difference is that this has on street parking on both sides of the road, which narrows the carriageway a bit and makes it slightly less comfortable to ride down. Um, this is really obvious advice, but considering I use streets like this a lot on this channel, I should probably mention it occasionally. You should always ride out of the door zone of parked cars. So, you can see I’m basically riding very close to the center line of the street. And the reason for that is that you don’t want someone to open the door of a parked car in your face when you’re cycling along. It could be pretty nasty. There’s a less than ideal bit coming up here, but it just about works. You’re meant to cycle briefly on this section of shared pavement to use this touan crossing to get you over the road. Uh there’s a blue sign indicating that the pavement is shared space at each end. Um personally, I think that it’s probably a bit too busy on this pavement to really be a comfortable cycle route, but it’s only for a second to get you across the road. Don’t forget this right turn here into Algenon Road. And then very quickly after that right turn, there’s another right turn hidden behind that parked car into Marsala Road. There is a little bit of wayf finding along here to help you find your way. You probably saw those mega sized cycle symbols painted on the street and there are also little blue signs pointing the way as well. This is an old London Cycle Network route. The streets in this section of the route aren’t completely free of through traffic. Uh, as you can see, there’s the odd car or van, though they’re on the quiet side and do okay for the short period of time that we find ourselves on them. These residential streets between Lady Well and the A20 in Lewisham seem to me like a really obvious candidate for a place to put a low traffic neighborhood. It wouldn’t just quieten down this cycle route, but it would also make it easier for people to get between Lewisham, Broccley, New Cross, and a few other places. Um, it’s really a missing piece of the jigsaw. Lewisham Council hasn’t historically been great when it comes to active travel, but they’ve got a couple of decent schemes out recently. There’s a filter on Cold Blow Lane and new protected lanes being built on Depford Church Street. So, hopefully they can take a look at this area, too. For this last stretch here, by the way, it’s worth taking the pathway along the riverside, if only to avoid the horrible plastic speed bumps that are in the road there, which are a bit painful to ride over. Uh, you then just ride through Cornmill Gardens, and you find yourself pretty much right in front of Lewishan Railway Station. If you need to continue this route further north towards Depford, uh, you actually bear left here before you get to the road. And there’s actually a touan crossing like a a pedestrian crossing which are allowed to cycle over and you can use that. This crossing for some reason isn’t a touan crossing. It’s just a regular crossing. So I’m going to dismount and then uh just walk over here and show you that we’re standing in front of Lewisham railway station. And we’ve made it all the way from Catford to Lewisham. It’s a pleasant and good option to do that route by bike. I think at the beginning we saw that city mapper had it about 12 minutes by public transport if you use the train and that includes an average wait for the train which is quite infrequent and a walk out of the station and down the street a little bit to where we started and ended the videos. Uh by bus it’s a bit longer cuz it has to go kind of a longer way around. It can’t cut through the park like we did on the bike. So overall I think you’re looking at a nice ride and one that gets you there in pretty good time. This video is obviously a bit shorter than uh some of the other ones I do on this channel, but I thought it was an interesting one to document. It is actually part of a longer route called the Waterlink Way, which runs all the way down to Beckenham and even towards Cudon, depending on where you start it from. I’ve been wanting to shoot some videos down it for a while, but unfortunately, a lot of it isn’t very good. There’s bits that go on muddy paths through Norwood Country Park. There are bits that gone quite busy roads and neither of those I think meet the standards of the channel even if it could be a nice leisure ride. But there have been some improvements made to it recently as part of the cycle way 18 project and I think the section we just did is very much up to grade and I thought it was a good one to start with. I’ll probably be doing a few more sections as videos and maybe as those improvements come in, I will link more of them together and maybe do a longer video coming in from Beckenham and maybe even connecting into places like Debford, Greenwich, etc. Um, do let me know on the channel if you’d like to see more videos along that corridor and also what you thought of the route we took today. Do you think it’s up to standard? Uh, what would you change about it? That sort of thing. Please do hit like on YouTube if you enjoyed watching that. helps other people find the video. Please subscribe if you haven’t already. Um, I post new videos every week and thank you once again to everyone who supports the channel on Patreon. I really appreciate it and it does help keep the channel going. There’s a link in the description below the video for anyone else who’d like to help support it. Thanks again for watching and I’ll see you all again next time. Goodbye.