Hinterlands and Peninsulas

8am Saturday morning and North London still having breakfast. Neatly terraced houses, quiet parks, a handful of runners, some dog walkers. White vans and red buses. Vicky Park and the Olympic Park, stadiums and modern office blocks. Exiting the city over canals and forgotten rivers, entering the scruffy bits in the margins of the A-to-Z. The inbetween places, not quite anywhere, neither here nor there. Railway arches and lock-ups. A cycle lane next to six lanes of stinking traffic for longer than is pleasant. A long line of riders stretching ahead and behind. Bunching up at the lights. Long straight stretches of roads that remind me of the outskirts of Eastern European capital cities, Sofia or Belgrade. Urban wasteland, weeds pushing through broken concrete and chicken wire fencing, nature reasserting itself. A zigzag ramp over a railway line onto Rainham Marshes. Greys replaced by overgrown greens. Traffic noise fades…

I relax but realise I’ve lost power to my front mech. Ah dammit, I forgot to charge the gears. 160km left to go with limited gear changes. Don’t know how many so I’d better be sparing. At least Essex is flattish or at least I think (hope) it is. Along the bank of the Thames, giant warehouses and cranes opposite. A cruise ship docked down river by the Dartford Bridge. Turn inland, back over the A13 (Trunk Road to the Sea) and then the M25. Glimpses of pretty Essex, handsome churches, pubs on greens, whitewashed timbered houses. It’s all a little bit 1930’s period drama, half expecting Miss Marple to appear from the doorway of the village shop.

Then it’s back into the liminal spaces, on the edges, in the gaps. Ring roads and underpasses, out of town retail parks. Leisure centres and car dealerships. Confused cycle paths, traffic lights and hopping curbs. Shiny tractors and a space age water tower. And flags, so many flags and not because of the football. These flags aren’t celebrating the World Cup, they are telling to world to go back home, that it’s not welcome. This is fucking depressing. I consider calling it a day and jumping on a train back to London.

My mood improves as I get back into pretty Essex even though the ratio of flags to houses will remain high for the rest of the day. The sun is shining and I stick some happy tunes in my ears, try to ignore the fluttering hatred. Right angle bends all the way to the eastern edge of the land and an ancient chapel that’s stood here since Saxon times. Go back far enough and we all came from somewhere else.

The rear mech has also lost power, I’m now stuck with one gear. Turn around and retrace the left straight right straight left straight and repeat. Roads wrapped around old field boundaries I presume. When I hit the southern coastline of the Dengie peninsula I turn back into the wind towards London. Essex starts to undulate but at least the trees shield me from the headwinds. Lanes are less straight, more wiggly. Avenues of trees, vaulted ceilings of verdant greens fracturing sunbeams. A packet of crisps and refilling water bottles in the shade of a village green. 

Toot Hill, I’ve been this way before, years back riding from Cambridge to Brighton via the Tilbury-Gravesend ferry. Descending from the low hills the roads lace themselves back through London’s arterial roads. A long straight run through satellite towns that blur into one another, I think Epping Forest must be to my right. Queues of cars at lights, stop start stop start. Burrow under the North Circular and roll down into East 17 and the final stretch back to Tottenham.