🚲 Cycling from Shoreditch to Hackney is now so easy. But will it stay that way?

You can cycle from Shoreditch in east central London to Hackney in north East London, entirely on quiet streets and protected cycle lanes.

The route is 3km long (1.86 miles) and makes use of the Bethnal Green LTN in Tower Hamlets, the traffic free Goldsmiths Row, paths on London Fields and the traffic-free Broadway Market.

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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/1619279956?share_token=aorT3z2IwbbipQvY02BLC0BXvuDJaE3J9CoHDQVnVJuhPWetGr&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=51.50521349609208%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=51.54538157042358%2C-0.16266747805780746&z=12

hello and welcome back to London cycle routes today I’ll be showing you how to cycle from sh ditch in East Central London to Hackney in Northeast London this ride takes just 10 minutes and you can do the whole thing on quiet streets and protected cycle Lanes by public transport the same Journey could take you as long as half an hour so cycling is a brilliant way to make this trip if you’re looking to save a bit of time 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 everybody who supports the channel on patreon if you’d like to contribute as well then you can find a link in the description below the video all right let’s get going so we’re starting opposite shortage High Street Station and we’re going to turn around and head straight up chance Street chance street is very quiet and rarely has any traffic on it but it does suffer from the disadvantage of being cobbled this looks kind of cool but it is very very bone shaking if you’re riding it on a road bike so do just be aware of that the first part of our journey today is through the boundary estate which is these red brick buildings either side of us this was actually Britain’s first Council estate and opened in 1894 since 2020 the streets around here have been incredibly quiet and mostly free of traffic thanks to these planters that were put in by Tower hamlets Council unfortunately a new Administration was elected to the council which is actually looking to remove schemes like this including this one and reintroduced through traffic to these streets which would seriously make it a much worse place to cycle they’ve been threatening to do that since 2022 but they’ve been bogged down in the courts with legal challenges that have prevented them from doing it so far I really hope that they do think again because the scheme has made a huge difference to this part of town and has really rebalanced the Streets back to the majority of people who are not driving but are just walking or cycling to get around the Bethel green ltn as it’s called has also really quietened down this street here Columbia Road which we’re on um as you can see from the markings on the ground this is a a designated cycle route it’s a cycleway 13 it’s called which is a tfl route and the lack of through traffic on here does mean that it’s generally a really comfortable ride cars can still obviously access this area you see there’s someone driving in here they just can’t use it as a through route so if they need to visit shops or if there maybe a Trader coming for the market on the weekend which sets up here then they can drive if they need to to but it’s just not somewhere where through traffic passes through anymore and it’s made a huge difference I particularly like this treatment that we’ve got on the ground here with the cobbles in the middle and the slightly smoother surface either side like a cycle Lane maybe one that they could put on chance Street near shortage High Street Station just to uh make it a little bit more cycle friendly this whole section here is rather neat there’s quite a Nifty cycle Crossing there which keeps you separate from pedestrians then a cycle path and then we turn left onto Goldsmith’s row Goldsmith’s row is actually pretty unusual for a road in London in that it’s actually got bouts at both ends so it’s completely carf free it’s not like a low traffic neighborhood where cars can drive in an access you’re not going to run into anything here and it’s absolutely lovely to cycle on that stretch of it it does revert to a more normal streak quite quickly but even this bit of it is still in a low traffic neighborhood so there isn’t any through traffic here and it’s generally a comfortable ride you find a lot of people riding bikes around here because it is just a great way to get around this part of town when traffic levels are so low one thing I would say is that maybe the design of the streets hasn’t quite kept up with the reduced level of traffic that’s been created by these ltn schemes this is a really wide open Junction as you can see there’s not really any cars trying to get through it there there is this just this one here but a lot of that asphalt could I think be you know reclaimed and turned into a slightly larger Pavements perhaps public space things like that a great example of where the public space has benefited is here on Broadway Market now there is a big Market here on Saturday so you have to go around to the right it’s not really a problem but the rest of the week Broadway Market is more or less pedestrianized except for Access and you can see here loads of people sitting out it’s an absolutely lovely spot to come for a coffee a drink or something to eat it feels like it’s been that way forever but actually until the pandemic there was a lot of traffic on that street it wasn’t always a great place to ride a bike or even to sit out one Improvement that could be made here is to turn that zebra Crossing into a parallel sort of pedestrians and cycle zebra Crossing to make it easier to get into London Fields on the path here um but you saw what I did there I used a little trick which is wait for a pedestrian to trigger there’s a recrossing stock traffic and then you can go yourself there’s always plenty of people walking here so you should never have to wait too long if you’re using that trick now London Fields path should be a nightmare um it’s a really busy path um You’ think that pedestrians were always straying into it but actually I think it’s so obvious and so many people know that it’s actually a bit tight here there’s a bit too many people riding bikes and a bit too many people walking too close for comfort that actually people do tend to stay out of the cycle path compared to a lot of other places I’ve been maybe in central London where you have a similar setup but still do be on the lookout for people maybe especially children perhaps running into the cycle path there do just take it slowly and be cautious and courteous to anybody who finds himself on the wrong side of the path there the same also goes for these Alleyways that we’re passing through now like Hackney Grove the council has done I think a decent job of squeezing a separate cycle path here next to the pavement in such a narrow space but you will sometimes find people dawling in the path so just be courteous and slow as you go down here now if you know Hackney well you’ll see dead ahead of us that is Hackney town hall and on the right is the Hackney picture house Cinema so we found our way to Mar street right in Hackney Central Hackney Central Station is just up to the left there and we’ve made it and that genuinely took us just 10 minutes to get from to Hackney so you can see why so many people make that journey by bike I think it’s probably one of the more popular cycle routes in London the public transport L aren’t super great but that Tower hamlets low traffic neighborhood scheme has made this an absolute Dream Ride it’s really really nice the whole way and uh I really do hope that the council keeps that scheme because it would be a tragedy to see it taken out it’s funny because the election pledge that that they had to take it out is a bit of an aloss around their neck now because CU I actually don’t hear anybody in that part of town complaining about the scheme at all and uh it was always I think a minority of critics but I do think that if they did proceed with it they would find that you know it wasn’t as popular as it was maybe two years ago before people got used to the idea of having traffic through streets like that so uh let’s see how it goes and hope that we get a safe cycling across the whole of London um do hit the Subscribe button if you haven’t already and uh do like the video as well to help other people find it uh you can always download a root map of the video in the link below as well and make sure you check out the map of all the London cycle rots videos cuz I do routes like this across the whole of London and uh you can see where the videos go on a map which is a great way to browse them uh let me know in the comments what you think do you remember this route before the ltn scheme went in let me know what it was like and uh yeah I’ll see you all again next time bye