The London Thames in winter

The Thames in winter

The London Thames Cycleway

Perhaps you are of the hardier sort, riding through the dark days of winter, through the mud and incessant rain, but I am not of that kind. There was a time, around the winter solstice, when my bike and I travelled to Heathrow and jetted off to somewhere warm and dry to while away those dark days. However, somewhere along the way, long haul travel lost its allure. Airports became distinctly unpleasant places. The cost of the enterprise, once affordable, gradually became a burden. So now I don’t go away but hibernate instead, to emerge in early February, halfway between the winter and spring solstices.

‘Why the Thames?’ asked a friend who we will call H for now, when he heard after my re-emergence, that my first adventure of the year was going to be beside the London Thames. ‘You know it’,  he went on, ‘we all do. There’s nothing new to see’. So I challenged him.
‘Meet me at dawn in the Tiltyard of Hampton Court tomorrow. Not for a duel but for a Thames-side ride’. 

H is an impatient rider who likes to whirr quickly through the miles. Stopping mid-ride to look at things is definitely not his thing. But he was up for the challenge of a dawn ride beside the river.

As the sun rose behind Hampton Court Palace, we set off along Barge Walk, where citizens used to watch their king as he was rowed to and from London in his golden barge.

River mists twirled above the water, sometimes rising to hide the trees lining the far bank, sometimes wisping across the empty path. H slowed many times to wonder at the spectacle. By the time we were at Kew, dawn had truly broken; the sky was riot of vermillion, crimson, saffron and ginger. H took out his phone to capture it. ‘I couldn’t resist it’, he grinned when I teased him about never taking photos on a ride.

Before he shot off to work, we had breakfast at the Elderflower Cafe in Hammersmith where he told me that the ride was so good that we will have to meet tomorrow at Hammersmith Bridge. ‘We will ride together beside the river and through the dawn to my office’. It was not a request so much as an order.

So we met and rode again beside London’s sacred river. We stopped to watch the sun rising over the Sphinx which seemed, H said, to smile at a forgotten memory. We saw the Palace of Westminster turn pink, the dome of St. Pauls turn red, the river change from grey to madder. The cycle paths were empty, the city quiet as if it had been abandoned.

The following weekend was set fine too, so H told me that we were to meet and continue riding the London Thames Cycleway all the way to the city’s boundary at Erith. ‘I want to see what happens after Greenwich, for I never knew the city extended so far out’. Along the way, we paused to admire a very different London, industrial mixed with salt marsh. Rusting gantries set against an ultramarine sky, the glinting of the Thames Barrier in the morning sun, the distant towers of the city, the silvered mud flats with the ranks of white petroleum tanks lined up on the far bank. And all the while, H kept muttering, ‘Magic, pure magic’.

We arrived at the end of the pier at Erith, where H said, ‘I think that was the best ride I’ve ever done’.

So as our hibernation season draws to a close, and as the rain will soon stop (!), consider riding this magnificent and almost entirely traffic-free route. You could ride the whole route in a day, or choose short segments as time permits. Ride before work or after. There are any number of waterside pubs and cafés in which to warm cold fingers and toes, as well as innumerable monuments to visit. You’ll see a London that you thought you knew in a whole new light, and you’ll fall in love with this great city all over again.