Around London’s Magnificent Seven
Tower Hamlets Cemetery Park: not just a burial ground for the East End’s working class.
My early morning cycle ride to Abney Park sets me up for the journey ahead. Carrying on to Mile End, my body welcomes Hackney’s flat terrain. Not too much exertion yet.
At the bottom of Globe Road I turn left onto Mile End Road in order to continue my journey towards Tower Hamlets Cemetery Park. I’m now on the previously much-maligned Cycle Superhighway 2. Hard to believe that it was only a few years ago that this long road, running from Aldgate East to Stratford, was nothing more than a blue strip with no dividing line between motor vehicles and bicycles.
The difference between then and now couldn’t be starker. At present an off-road, segregated lane snakes almost all the way eastwards.
I fall behind a head-down, traffic-charging, heavily tattooed fellow cyclist. “Fellow” might be stretching it a bit. With his brake-free, fixed-wheel track bicycle, he belongs to the sort of tribe for whom purity in cycling is all that matters. A frame, two wheels, pedals, handlebar and seat (D-lock hanging from his rucksack, of course). That’s it. Who needs my seven gears when his own muscular legs can propel him anywhere he wants to go?
