I’ve had, but not touched, a book of London bike rides for far too long. So, today, I set out with James-Paul to cycle ride five: London Bridge to Greenwich by way of the north bank, and back by way of the south.

Except we didn’t quite do that. We got to Greenwich in much less time than we expected: little more than an hour and a half, and so we carried on, crossing over the river by way of the Greenwich Foot Tunnel and, after a coffee in a side street from which we could look in through the open door of the poodle-perking parlour, on along the south bank of the Thames to the Flood Barrier, at which the 180m Thames Path begins. As such, we did much of routes six and seven, too.

No two miles of that route are the same. Sometimes you are passing expensive flats on cobbled streets; at times riding through battered industrial yards on battered, potholed paths puddled by the rain; sometimes cycling by factories and refineries, and at other times past the Dome, City Airport or the Barrier itself.

And, at one point, past a document storage warehouse with a stark warning.

We ate pie, potatoes and peas at a place in Greenwich so notable that it owns the domain pieshop.co.uk. The oldest pie shop in London, it would have been hard to beat. We both had Banks Pie, the vegetarian option, named after the late local MP, Tony Banks, who listed the building within mere hours of visiting, saving it from the scourge of town planners.

An idyllic Sunday, which has left me a little saddle-sore. It was well worth it.

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