Ride London

So this weekend has been the Ride London cycling festival.

For those that don’t know, the Ride London festival is a two day cycling festival with the Saturday seeing many of London’s roads closed to allow people to cycle traffic free along parts of London that would usually be full of cars. The Sunday sees the traffic free roads extend down into Dorking and Surrey to allow riders to cycle a 100 mile route with no traffic.

I didn’t enter the lottery for the Ride London 100 (the Sunday ride) this year and I didn’t want to enter for a charity as many charities had huge costs associated with riding for them (Anthony Nolan wanted £750 sponsorship per person!)

However, the Saturday ride is free so that’s what I did.

Ride

I joined the ride at Trafalgar Square - I wasn’t quite sure what the process was but just joined as everyone stopped to let pedestrians cross.

We headed down to Embankment and then out towards the City.

With no traffic, and the City being fairly empty, I managed to get some photos.

The impressive Cheesegrater building (there was recently a documentary on this on Channel 5 explaining the design and build process that was really interesting - great to see BIM getting used now in the trade!)

I was also able to get a close up of one of my favourite buildings in London - the Lloyds building.

Coming back round London, things got a little congested at the Mall.

I ended up meeting Bumblebee on the route round and then towards halfway round the second time, we bumped into more of the London Brompton Club.

At this point, we decided to call it a day and headed to Look Mum, No Hands! for a well earned tea and cake - the route was good, however, I think I’d rather take my chances with the traffic! I saw a number of instances of crashes - potentially some of them were from people going far to quick for how busy it was (some points it was PACKED) and others seemed to be from kids all over the place (which is fair enough, as they’re to young to know better).

Detour

I left the club and then headed over to Regent’s Park to meet the girlfriend and friends and finished the day sat in the park. It’s only the second time I’ve cycled part of the park - I think I should do some laps at some point as it was quite a nice road surface and everything.

I took the P type - partly because I was going to get myself a Brompton Rack bag for my holidays in a few weeks time but I ended up forgetting my wallet! Anyhow, was nice to get it out and give it a spin! Still think I need to break the Brooks saddle in a bit more though. Maybe it’ll be ready for the St Crispins Day night ride that I’ve signed up to last week.

Route