🚲 The quiet way to cycle from Peckham to Camberwell

You can cycle from Peckham in south London to Camberwell up the road entirely on quiet streets and protected cycle lanes.

The route is 3.1km long (1.9 miles) and makes use of car-free Rye Lane and the Brunswick Park LTN, as well as other modal filters and quiet streets in the area.

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/2585664088?share_token=aTeDOQRlbaYZj6RX03vjOdL2DkCbJP3RS2YkWNpVmVxQrNEU03&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 Peekom in South London to Campberwell just down the road. This ride takes 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 over 15 minutes. So, cycling is a great way 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 Ry Lane and we’re going to head northbound. For anyone who’s not been to Ry Lane for a few years, it’s actually buses and bikes only most of the time these days. So, it’s a perfectly comfortable place to ride a bike and it makes for quite a useful north south low traffic access through the town center and in the direction that we need to go. Southern Council did experiment with removing buses and all motor traffic from the street back in 2020, but that experiment didn’t last and they’ve settled on this compromise where there are still buses. I think it’s perfectly fine for cycling as they’re not super frequent. They don’t move very fast and they’re quite predictable. Although it is sort of a shame that they didn’t get to do something a bit more radical with the public space on here. We’re going to turn off left now down Highshore Road in the direction of Campberwell. As you can see, it’s closed with Bolars at one end, so there isn’t any through traffic on this section of it, making it relatively quiet to ride down. Peekham and Campbell are right next to each other. And if you wanted to, you could just ride straight down Peekom Road to get there. I do that sometimes, but it’s really not a nice road to ride down. And this route in this video is for people who want to take a quieter back street route. Maybe if they’re less confident, they’re traveling with kids, or they just prefer to ride on quieter streets. It’s not really any longer and I think it also has fewer traffic lights on it, so it might end up being faster depending on how lucky you are. That said, the street that we’re briefly on for now is probably the worst bit of this whole route. Lindhust Way does have a little bit of through traffic on it. You probably saw a few cars and this whole area could benefit from a low traffic neighborhood in my opinion. We’re not on Lindhurst Way for long, though. And when these lights turn green, we cross over Peckham Road to Kelly Avenue, which has a physical filter at the end here. And so no through traffic like most of the rest of today’s route. There are loads of modal filters in this part of town, keeping the whole thing really quite quiet. In fact, when we make our next turn into Bambber Road, you’ll see these bolards here, which are also stopping traffic, using this street as a rat run, and just making it a much nicer environment for cycling. You might notice that this boxy looking cargo bike just ahead of us here that’s been used by a delivery firm. It’s an interesting thing to spot because I think it’s indicative of the kind of virtuous circle that you get when you create safe routes for cycling around cities. The traffic levels here are low enough that some firms clearly feel that deliveries can be shifted to vehicles like that rather than vans, which reduces traffic further. And that’s actually one less van on the street. Again, people will say, “Well, you’re never going to get everything delivered by bike.” And that’s probably true, but it doesn’t have to be true for there to be benefits. For example, that cargo bike overtook us, and I’d definitely rather be overtaken by a cargo bike than a Ford Transit van. The streets that we’re riding on now are actually part of what’s called the Brunswick Park low-ra neighborhood. This was designed by Southern Council, but one of my favorite facts about it is that it was actually part funded by the Guys and St. Thomas’ NHS Trust Charitable Arm, which judged that the scheme was a cost-effective intervention to improve people’s health since it would make it easier for people to walk and cycle. Personally, I’d love to see more public health interventions like that. And certainly, we’ve seen more people on bikes on these streets than we have actually driving cars. Although, there are still a lot of parked cars around, often narrowing the carriageway quite significantly. And one way to make the environment feel more welcoming would definitely be to use some of the curbside for other uses like planting, seating, wider pavements. This just on the right there is actually a really nice example of what you can do. To be fair, a little bit of that has already happened as part of the low traffic neighborhood scheme, particularly around the modal filters. You can see the filter up ahead here on Elmington Road is not just a bolard closing the through route, but actually has some nice planting beds. And even quite a physically small intervention like that, I think has quite a big visual effect in my view, as it just breaks up what would otherwise be an endless line of parked cars lining the pavements. A bit more planting like that on every street, I think, would definitely just make the whole thing feel a lot more welcoming. And not just from a cycling perspective, but just from a place to be perspective. Don’t miss this turning up on the left here, which actually is a pretty good example of what you can do to a street without parked cars. There is just a lot more planting, some seating, lighting, and it’s probably just a nicer place to sit than your average street in any city around the UK. We’re arriving at Campbell Green now, and there’s actually a market here. Um, it’s the weekend and this market happens every week and yeah, it’s a lovely place to end the video and maybe just stop for a little bite to eat. I’ll bring the map up in a second so you can see the way we’ve come. Apart from at the very end, we don’t really double back on ourselves, so it isn’t really much longer than going straight down Peckham Road, but certainly with a lot less traffic. I did go down the main road alternative and count how many sets of traffic lights there are on the main road. And there are actually eight separate places that you could get stopped at traffic lights, whether that’s junctions or crossings. From memory, it can sometimes be a bit of a slog if you get unlucky at the lights. Some people will still prefer going down the main road, uh, but others will prefer to take the back streets. It really is up to you. Uh you can also go down Linhurst Grove and Campberwell Grove to the south, but they are a bit of a rat run currently. Hopefully SOC will filter them one day and they could make quite a good route, although they don’t really take you right to Campbell Green. And you’d still have to go on Peck and Road for a little while. But anyway, thank you so much for watching. Do let me know in the comments what you think of that. Uh, please do leave a like if you enjoyed the video to help other people find it and do hit subscribe if you want to see more videos like this. Thank you once again to everyone who supports the channel on Patreon. It’s really appreciated. And if you’d like to throw money at me, too, then you can find a link in the description below the video. I’ll see all you guys next time and I’ll see some of you in the comments. Goodbye.