🚲 The best way to cycle from Stoke Newington to Stratford traffic-free

You can cycle from Stoke Newington in north London to Stratford in east London entirely on quiet streets and protected cycle lanes.

The route is 8.5km long (5.2 miles) and makes use of Hackney LTNs, Cycleway 1, Cycleway 37 Victoria Park and protected lanes through the Olympic Park.

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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/2626479266?share_token=aLi8IhLEM7nukB8yj4ffmGldq2h33KzOwVUPyl6I22RziXRF4E&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 Stoke Newington in North London to Stratford in East London. This ride takes just over 30 minutes and you can do the whole thing on quiet streets and protected cycle lanes. By public transport, the same journey takes more like 45 minutes and requires a change of line. 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 Church Street, which is looking gorgeous and very sociable this morning thanks to the bus gate removing traffic from there. And we’re going to turn around and head down road. The first section of our route today follows cycle way one, which is a sign cycle way, which mostly weaves its way through back streets. And uh this section of it is pretty good, running through a bunch of different low traffic neighborhoods with no through traffic on it. And you can see that there’s plenty of people getting around by bike here, walking as well, and really not many cars moving. Like a lot of similar back street routes, one downside of this is that the carriageway is quite narrowed by parked cars. But some effort has been made to replace the parking around here with other curbside uses. So on the right coming up here, you can see a little wooden platform with tables, chairs, and planting. That is called a parklet. And in this case, it’s turned a parking space into a sociable little seating area for the cafe it’s in front of. You might also have noticed these curved green metal storage units along the street. Uh there’s one either side of the road just here on the left and right. Uh these are cycle hangers which are secure residential cycle parking provided by the council for a pretty small fee and they can each store six bikes. Typically they’re oversubscribed and there’s a big waiting list to get in one. Different councils are working through those lists at different speeds. Maybe this stuff is obvious to people who live in London. I don’t know. But I think it’s interesting to look at all the different uses councils are finding for the curbside instead of just parking. When we get across the A10 here onto Farley Road, we’ll see another kind of novel use on the right here and that is bays for dockless bikes. I think those are a fantastic idea personally. You know, jockless bikes have been in a lot of respects really positive for cycling in London and you see such a variety of people cycling now that you wouldn’t previously have seen riding a bike. For example, people dressed to go out in the evening. Um, but there have clearly been downsides as well, mostly regarding dodgy parking, blocking the pavements, I think. So, I think a dense network of dockless bike bays like that and pretty strict rules in the app requiring you to put one in there and kind of geoence by GPS is definitely the way to go. Right, I have rambled about sustainable curb size for a little bit too long, I think. So, I’ll just say some words about the route. As you might have noticed, we’ve left cycleway one. We turned off it down Brighton Road, which turned into Farley Road. And if we keep going straight ahead, we’ll be going down Road, but we’re not going to go that way. We’re going to turn on to Hackne Downs, which is a park, and it has these shared paths that run across it. Now, you really got two options here. You could keep going down road which runs alongside the park or you can cut a corner by using this traffic-free shared path. I think people will come to different conclusions on this. Some people really don’t like sharing paths with pedestrians. And if that’s you, you’re probably going to want to keep going straight down road, which is kind of low traffic anyway. It does have a modal filter along it. But uh I’m going to cut the corner here. Obviously, when you’re riding on a path like this, ride slowly, cautiously, and courteously around pedestrians and don’t spook anybody or anything like that. If you do take Down’s Road, when you get to the end of that street, you’re going to need to turn right down Queens down road, which you can just see along the hedge row on the left there. And uh we’re just approaching that ourselves. Now, you do actually come up to quite a big junction here, but there’s an easy way to deal with it, which is you take this little path here leading to the cycle crossing just here. And then you wait for the green light and then you should just have a full green with no conflicts to get across onto this modal filter onto nice and quiet Downs Park Road. This section of the route is a little bit wiggly and if you’re not familiar with it and you need a little bit of extra help navigating it, you can always download the free map of the route. I’ve linked to it in the description below the video and I’m hosting it on a website called Kimoot. You can either look at it on there or download it as a GPX file and use whatever app or device you want. Thank you to everyone who provided a bit of feedback on Kimoot in the last video. By the way, it was genuinely useful. So, my understanding is Kimoot made some changes to its business model and you should still be able to download the GPX file for free and look at the map. But one issue is that Kimoot only lets you download maps from one region before it starts asking you to pay for an account. There is an easy workaround though, which is that if your region isn’t set to London, just create a new free account and set your region to London. And all the maps on this channel should still be free to use. Now, this path alongside the churchyard is pretty narrow and it’s shared with pedestrians, so do be careful as you ride down here. Uh this route and its continuation south actually runs parallel to May Street which is the main road through Hackne Central and it’s the best way of getting past Hackne Town Center without having to deal with lots of traffic. Unfortunately, Hackne seems to have abandoned its previous plans to put protected cycle lanes on Mayor Street itself, which would have been great and allow people to bypass some of the pretty obvious problems with that path. Um, instead they’re apparently planning to put in wider bus lanes on Mayor Street to um, I quote, help people overtake stopped buses, which is not a great idea and sounds like something out of 2002. I don’t think that’s going to help anyone who doesn’t already feel comfortable riding a bike on that busy road. Really, there are local elections next year in Hacknne, and it’s possible there might be a change of administration. So, we’ll see if the council changes its approach on issues like that. But for now, I’ll be sticking to the church path to get past the town center. To be fair to Hackne, it has mostly done a pretty good job with reducing traffic on its back streets, which is why we’re able to do this route and why a lot of this route is on back streets rather than on the main road. The issue with back street routes, though, is that they can be a little bit difficult to navigate. Case in point, don’t miss this turning here into Brent House Road. Now, in a moment here, we turn off left down Frampton Park Road. You may be interested to know that the next section of this route actually follows the route of cycleway 37, which is supposed to connect Hackne all the way down to Canary Warf and the aisle of dogs. It was consulted on in 2019, but unfortunately progress has really stalled, partly as TfL has no money and partly thanks to Tower Hamlet’s Council being very anti-cycling under its current administration. However, this section of the route between Hackne and Victoria Park, which we’re taking today, is basically all in place, including a bunch of modal filters to keep traffic really low. Uh, so we’re going to use it for our route today. C37 is meant to continue south past Victoria Park with a bus gate on Grove Road, which Tower Hamlet is refusing to install, and protected cycle lanes on Grove Road, Berdick Road, and West India Dock Road, none of which TfL seems to have a cash to build thanks to local government cuts. Um, if that were built, it would create an incredibly convenient route from Hackne and beyond down to Canary Warf and the rest of the aisle of dogs, even the Greenwich foot tunnel, actually. Um, and Canary Warf is obviously a huge employment center, so clearly it’s a really good one to build. Um, I did do a video a few months ago showing the best current alternative available though, so do check that out. If you want to find that route and other routes like it, make sure you check out the map of all the different London cycle routes videos that I’ve done. It is uh linked in the description below the video. It’s maintained by a viewer called Isaac. Thanks very much for doing that, Isaac. And it’s a really great way of browsing the different routes that I’ve made videos of. You can see which routes are in your area, which routes are in an area you’re traveling to, and you can watch the video. It’s linked from within the map. Do check that out. I will link to it below. Gore Road here runs alongside Victoria Park and it’s pretty quiet thanks to a modal filter installed at the end of it a few years ago. This street isn’t actually in the park and so it’s open 24 hours a day, but the park itself, which we’ll be going into in a second, is actually closed at night, which can be an issue for some people who are traveling maybe after work in the winter. There is fortunately a way around it. Instead of going into the park and using the paths like we’ve done here, you could continue going straight over the end of Gore Road past that pub and you’ll find yourself on Weatherall Road. Continue down Weatherall Road and you’ll get to a street called Victoria Park Road. That’s not a particularly nice street to cycle on, but the pavement alongside it is actually shared space. There are blue signs there telling you that you can cycle on it. So, if you need to bypass the park for whatever reason, that is the road to take. You can do it. And it is technically traffic free, although you should be really careful on the pavement as there will be people walking as well. When you get to the end of that street, you’ll be able to rejoin this route at Katagan Terrace, which is the road that we’ll get to at the end of the park. While the park is open though, I definitely recommend cycling through it. These paths, particularly the ones along the outside perimeter that we’re using, are incredibly wide, almost like a road in themselves. And even though it’s quite busy on this sunny day, it’s really comfortable to ride down here. You can see there’s plenty of people walking, running, wheeling, scooting, and pushing. And there really is no conflict between them because it’s such a wide path. Finding your way in the park is also really easy. We mostly go straight on from when we enter it. But it’s really just a case of remembering when to turn right. And the way to remember when to turn right is after the white house. So you can see I kind of stop here and think, no, I don’t turn right there. I see the white house here. And then after that house, I turn right at the next right. So this here. And that’ll be sending us along the eastern edge of the park. and ready to leave it in a moment onto Kadagan Terrace. Victoria Park has a fascinating history. It was founded in 1841 by act of parliament following a petition to Queen Victoria by the people of the East End as well as notable epidemiologists who felt that creating a pleasant outdoor public space for people in the East End to use would relieve the spread of disease and ill health in the area. This was at a time when slums were prevalent in the East End. And you can probably imagine what a difference it would have made. If you’re doing this route when the park is closed, by the way, this spot on Katagan Terrace, going into Katagan Close is where you’d rejoin the route. Now, a century and a bit after they built the Victoria Park to improve people’s health in the East End, unfortunately, someone had a much worse idea, which was to build a massive motorway through it called the East Cross route. Uh, this big motorway that we’re crossing would have been part of a much wider London motorway plan, which thankfully largely wasn’t delivered. But that bit did get built, and it does a lot to create severance in this part of the city. We were able to get over it using a bridge which does have a ramp on it but can be a bit narrow in parts and uh remember that pedestrians are using it too so just be careful when you’re using it. Next up we have a quick cycle through Hackne Wick which is relatively low traffic around here partly cuz it’s severed by the motorway and doesn’t really go anywhere. And at the end of Hacknewick, we actually have another bridge which is crossing over the river Lee at the end of Wallace Road. Now you have two options on this bridge. There is actually an elevator here on the left which you can use. You can see it going up there. Or I’m going to use the bike channel to push my bike up here. I don’t know whether this counts as accessible because yeah, a lift would normally be considered an accessible bridge, but obviously not all adaptive cycles or cargo bikes would necessarily fit in a lift. I’m afraid I don’t have measurements of a lift. I don’t really know how big it is. I probably should have gone down there with a tape measure to be honest cuz I do try and keep these roots accessible for everyone. But uh yeah, that’s the question. You should be able to get in there without going up any steps if the lift is working. But it is a question of whether your bike will fit in such an elevator if you’re one of those people who is unable to dismount. For most people using a standard cycle though, you could probably push it up that bike channel like I did or you can probably get it in the lift too or even carry it up the steps. We’re now in the old Olympic Park, which if you know your London geography is pretty near Stratford or even in Stratford. And at the end of Copper Street, you’re going to turn down Waterdon Road. After the 2012 Olympics, the Olympic Park was converted into a new area of London with new streets. And a lot of those streets got cycle paths. Some of them were better than others. In fact, some of them were so bad they’ve had to be dug up and replaced with new paths built to a modern standard. This one is basically fine. Honestly, I don’t like how it merged with the pedestrian crossing we just went over. But apart from that, this section is certainly usable, especially now that they’ve moved some of the lamp posts out of the path. And there were some right in the middle of it before. It is still getting gradually renovated, though. And when I came through here in summer 2025 and shot this video, they were in the process of digging up a lot of it. Thankfully, there’s a decent works bypass here in place past the closed section. And uh it really wasn’t any trouble getting past this construction site. When I got to the end of the construction site, I got to see what the path is all going to look like when it’s finished. And frankly, it is much better. This looks really good. The planting just makes the whole area feel a lot nicer. This blue is meant to show turning vehicles that they should expect bikes coming across it. There’s just lots of other placemaking and improvements for people not just on bikes, but also walking or just enjoying the space. This improvement actually continues for quite a while down Westfield Avenue, but we’re not going to go all that way today. I’m just going to wait for a light and then dismount and head into the shopping center, which I think is fair to say is a good place to end the video in Stratford. Thanks very much for staying with me till the end of this one. I’m really pleased with this route. I think it’s probably one of the better long routes that I’ve done in a while. If you think it’s worth it, then please do leave a like to help other people find it. And if you’re enjoying this kind of video, then you should hit subscribe on the YouTube channel as I post new videos every week. And I do take requests, so let me know in the comments below if there’s anything in particular that you’d like to see or if you’ve got any particular feedback on the route. You can see from the map here that it is possible to cut the corner between Morning Lane and Victoria Park. You could go along Wick Road which has cycle lanes, but then there is a big knot of motorways west of Hackne Wick which does make it a little bit dodgy. There’s probably a way to do it without ending up on too busy a road, but I quite like going through the park anyway. So yeah, let me know what you think of that. And uh thank you once again to everyone who supports the channel on Patreon. I really appreciate it. You really do help keep this channel going. It is a lot of work and I do appreciate your support. If anyone else wants to throw money at me, then you can find a link in the description below the video to the Patreon. And uh yeah, thank you again to everyone for watching. Really appreciate it. And I’ll see you all again next week. Goodbye.