🚲 Cycling between stations: Fenchurch Street to Waterloo without traffic

You can cycle from Fenchurch Street station in central London to Waterloo station south of the river entirely on quiet streets and protected cycle lanes.

The route is 3.7km long (2.9 miles) and makes use of Cycleway 3, Cycleway 6, an quiet streets with modal filters on around Waterloo.

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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/2642433425?share_token=aNJPrDXJu5DT70dK25pYk683rpZUynbeoMI6BYDljU9E1hMJrJ&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=51.516975804561255%2C-0.21828576419061996&z=12

Hello and welcome back to London Cycle Routts. Today I’ll be showing you how to cycle from Fenurch Street Station in the city of London to Waterlue Station south of the river. This ride takes under 20 minutes and you can do the whole thing on quiet streets and protected cycle lanes. By public transport, the same journey also takes around 20 minutes and can take longer on weekends when the Waterloo and City line isn’t running. So, cycling is a great way to make this trip, especially because Fenture Street Station doesn’t have a tube station. 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 out the front of the station on the creatively named London Street. I joke, but apparently this street was named after a guy called John London, who was a land owner in the area back in the 18th century. It quickly leads us onto Mark Lane, which is nice and quiet thanks to those bolars that we passed through. And you’re never going to see any heavy traffic on here. At the end of the street, you should be able to access this little advanced waiting area for bikes here with any luck if there’s not a car stopped in it. We’re going to turn right next, but be really careful because buses do turn down Great Tower Street there. And uh I frankly wasn’t expecting that one and I stopped just in time. So yeah, do wait for traffic before you turn into the cycle lane here. Since I’m apparently doing street names this time, Biwad Street, which we’re just on and about to leave, is named after the Bard tower of the Tower of London, which is kind of a fortified gate house. So it was the street leading to the fortified gate house of the Tower of London. As you can probably guess, Tempame’s Street, which we’re currently on, once marked the banks of the river Temps, back in Anglo-Saxon times, the river is now to the left of those buildings on our left, thanks to the construction of various embankments throughout the years. Although, it doesn’t stop us going under London Bridge. If you’ve ever cycled in London, even as a visitor, I imagine you’re probably familiar with this particular cycle way. It’s cycleway three. It mostly runs along the embankment of the river tempames, although it is slightly set back from it here. It’s a really really great asset for the city and connects a lot of routes through central London. My biggest downside of it though is probably that it has so many traffic lights, which you often have to stop at for no reason at all. There isn’t really that much pedestrian traffic down here as Temp Street isn’t really a very nice place to walk. To me, it would make sense to turn some of these light control crossings into zebra crossings, at least across the cycle track, so that pedestrians always had priority and didn’t have to wait for the lights. But when the crossing was empty, you can still just cycle through it. In practice, a lot of people will treat the signal controlled crossings like zebras anyway and will happily jump the lights when there are no people waiting at them. So, uh, it kind of makes sense to formalize that for people who are following the rules as well. One of the sadder sites you can see along a cycle route is on Castle Bayard Street here, where there’s always a lot of tents from people sleeping rough and using the street as shelter. This is obviously really sad to see and it is a symptom of a deeper systemic crisis in the way that we deal with housing in this city and this country. This whole area around Castle Bayard Street may be redeveloped in the coming years and the cycle way might also end up being rerooed. I’m going to be keeping my eye on developments there. So, do subscribe to the channel if you want to keep up with the latest news on it. I know a lot of people enjoyed my video that I did at the end of last year looking forward to cycle developments this year, new infrastructure, what was on the horizon for cycling in the city, etc. I am planning on doing something similar this year and maybe looking at what did and didn’t end up happening. I do try and make videos specifically covering new infrastructure and developments as they open individually throughout the year. But there’s also a lot of stuff that is still currently under construction that will either open uh near the end of this year or maybe even fall into next year or even the year after. So yeah, I want to go through that systematically and kind of catalog what has happened cuz there is quite a bit to talk about. So yeah, hit subscribe if you’re interested in seeing that. Back to the route, we’ve done this little hairpin bend to get up to the top of Black Fry’s Bridge. And to be honest, this little stretch here is an absolute no-brainer for converting these crossings into zebras cuz it’s actually really common to come here and just have it completely deserted of pedestrians, but with loads of bikes waiting at the lights. Um, I think it can get really busy at peak times, but it’s quite variable, so it really makes sense to fix that up. Now, our destination today is Waterloo Station, and we’re going to take a slightly different route into the station today to the one that I normally take in videos. And that’s because this rear has been closed due to construction for quite some time, but recently reopened. And I think it’s a really good way of doing it. The trick is to keep an eye out on the right for the Novatel Hotel and to turn down the little passageway just before it. That is called Maymot Street, and we’ll get there in a second. Annoyingly, it’s only one way. So if you were doing this route in the opposite direction, you would take Columbbo Street which runs parallel to it and is one way in the opposite direction. May Street is just here. In my view, it would be better to have two-way cycling on this street. So, you know, an accept cycle sign and a contraflow cycling sign, but uh it works fine if you remember what to do in the opposite direction. Maymont Street puts you onto Ruple Street, which you’ll probably be quite familiar with if you’ve ever watched TV, as it’s really commonly used as a filming location. And it’s not difficult to see why. It’s got some very picturesque houses. In fact, I’ve actually seen Rupal Street used on signage in films, even when it’s not been filmed at Rupal Street. So, I think it’s probably become a little bit of a meme amongst film and TV production people. One downside from our point of view on a bike is that that does mean that it is sometimes closed for filming. Um I have come here a few times and seen that especially on a weekend. So uh keep an eye out for that. And if you need to bypass it, you can always just use the cut which runs parallel to it but it’s a slightly longer route. After weaving our way through those bolards which keep things nice and quiet and the motor traffic levels very low, we pass Waterloo East Station and we arrive at Waterloo Main Station which is just here. So we’ve gone all the way from Fenurch Street to Waterloo. I have to say I’ve never got a train to Fenurch Street or from Fenurch Street possibly because it doesn’t have a tube station. So I never really thought about going there. It’s never really occurred to me. But uh now that I know how to cycle there, particularly from Waterloo, I will do so. I know that people often ask for routes connecting the different stations and I thought that this was an important one to do as of course venture street isn’t on the tube famously. But if there are any other station links that you would like to see or any other routes at all really, do just let me know in the comments and I will see what I can do. Also, let me know in the comments what you think of the video. If you enjoyed it, please do leave a like as well. that helps other people find it. And you can always hit subscribe if you’d like to see more videos like this. And I would once again like to thank everyone who supports the channel on Patreon. I really appreciate it. And if anyone else would like to join them in doing so, you can always find a link in the description below the video. I’ll see you guys again next time. Goodbye.