Old Street to the Giro Cycling Cafe Esher via Richmond Park
A stag perfecting his Autumnal rut, a diminished engineering icon and a forlorn eighteenth century ‘lady’ punctuated the route for a select Clarion contingent on the cusp of the equinox. Departing Old Street in the face of a 16mph south westerly, the five stalwarts powered along the Embankment like a peloton possessed, and were soon spinning through Fulham’s terraces with heart-pounding urgency.
We mustered as one of the year’s highest tides peaked. Criss-crossing the river on our westward excursion, we observed the fluvial serpent’s withdrawal. The bridges of Putney, Kingston and Hampton Court provided our snapshots of the torrential outpouring – as well as sight the rowers, kayakers and sailors who make the Thames their playground.
Rolling on to Richmond Park’s car-less tarmac, we joined the swarming lycra drones who circuit the Royal recreation space. How Rapha struggles to turn a profit is a mystery when half the legal professionals in the capital appears to be sweating through their apparel on Ham Gate Avenue? Still, the buck of our pack demonstrated that mammon is not the only effective motivator, showing the throng a clear pair of wheels up the slopes on his 72-inch-geared fixie.
Catching our breath we came upon a herd of the deer for which the park is famed, and were lucky to catch a magnificent ‘sixteen pointer’ doing battle with the branches of a tree. Watching the mechanics of natural selection in the raw left me grateful anew for human kind’s rather more genteel courtships.
If stamina was flagging as the Clarion reached Hampton Court Palace, some might have wondered about alternative transportation options? Passing Hardy’s most intriguing used car lot, who could ignore the 1987 Rolls Royce Silver Spur – coachwork gleaming, V8 primed, and yours for only £23,995. The same dealer was offering, for £3,000 more, a primitive Citroën H van, older, ‘agricultural’. and fashioned from corrugated iron. Could either vehicles original owners have imagined that one day these would be their relative values?
Our destination was Esher’s Giro Cafe – a cyclists’ pitstop for the flat-white era. What our Clarion forbears would have made of a cafe with its own podcast, ‘merch’, and a charity tie up with Ugandan cyclists is impossible to know? I like to think that they would have approved – once they had got over paying £4 for a cup of coffee.
For a short stretch, our return took us down the A3 ‘Portsmouth Road’ – so clogged with cars that it would be hard to imagine any distance awheel along this ancient route. We turned off at the milestone known as ‘the White Lady’. Erected in 1787, and appearing as a ghost from another age, she reminds us that such timeworn thoroughfares served very different travellers for centuries before the onslaught of internal combustion.
With the wind in our favour, the 21-mile return passed in a blur with time only for the companions to resolve that such speed was agreeable.
Our outing concluded behind Cornhill’s Royal Exchange, enjoying a tea from Kiani’s, served in the Persian style. Location and libation were steeped in capital and empire, its true – but it was the possibility for a human-centred world that was the toast of the Clarion party.
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