A Route to Salvation Just Outside Croydon

Riding gravel my way, and escaping London without going very far

Words by Charlie Codrington

I love riding off road. Hard, and given half a chance, fairly fast. But if that was all I wanted, I wouldn’t have spent so much of my life disappearing down insignificant-looking bridleways just to see where they go.

For me, gravel has always been as much about exploring as riding. An old track vanishing behind a hedge. A faint line on an Ordnance Survey map. A bridleway squeezing between two housing estates, or something that looks suspiciously as though it once went somewhere important. I’m interested.

Sometimes there’s brilliant riding on the other side. Sometimes it’s just a field. Occasionally it’s a field containing something completely inexplicable. You never quite know, and that’s the point.

Most of my riding starts in London, or an easy train ride from it, and over the years that curiosity has turned into more than 50 routes around the capital.

The bits of London the city never quite swallowed

One of the joys of gravel in London is how easily you can disappear without going very far. You find yourself in a strip of woodland a couple of hundred yards wide, with houses and railway lines on every side, and once you’re inside it the city has gone.

These places are everywhere once you start looking. Commons, heaths, river corridors, old railway lines, unmade tracks, scraps of ground where development never quite happened. Some are protected parks. Others survive because generations of locals refused to let them go.

London doesn’t end neatly. It frays.

Houses become allotments, allotments become woods, a path slips under a railway, crosses a stream and comes out as an old track. Follow enough of those threads and you get surprisingly far.

That’s really where Hidden Tracks came from. I wanted to know where the tracks went, and what they might join up with next.

I like finding things

The best rides nearly always contain something you weren’t expecting.

Knights in armour practising in a field. Medieval manor houses, abandoned military sites, pillboxes sinking into hedges and old tracks built for tanks. A retired Concorde. Salt roads, drovers’ tracks and pilgrim routes, semaphore towers, bits of the old Brooklands circuit, strange tunnels and avenues of enormous redwoods.

I’ve seen giraffes looking over a hedge.

And in a small church at Chaldon, a few miles south of Croydon, there’s a wall painting from around 1200 of the Ladder of Salvation: souls climbing out of purgatory while demons try to drag them back down. It is, more or less, a route map. Who knew there was a route to salvation just outside Croydon?

A bike travels at exactly the right speed for this. Fast enough to cover real ground, slow enough to spot a peculiar building through the trees and think, hang on, what the hell is that? So you stop and have a ferret about.

The landscape starts explaining itself

After a while the odd things stop looking random. A row of pillboxes turns into a defensive line. An old holloway shows how people crossed a hill before anyone built the A-road beside it. A bridleway squeezed between a golf course and the M25 may be following a line people have used for centuries. And the little white posts you keep passing in hedges are coal tax posts, around 210 of them still standing in a rough ring 12 to 18 miles out, put up in the 1860s to mark where coal coming into London started paying duty to the City.

Roll into a village of twenty houses and find an enormous coaching inn on the green, and the quiet lane you’ve just ridden probably wasn’t always quiet. It was a turnpike, a drove road or the main way from London to somewhere that mattered. You start to see the older landscape under the newer one. Then you start looking for it.

Then I start joining them together

This is the slightly obsessive part. Finding one good track is easy. Joining dozens into a route that flows, dodges most of the roads and actually gets somewhere is another matter, and it’s the bit I enjoy most.

Can I get from London to Brighton mostly off road? Ride from Oxford back into London? Circle the whole city? Start at Land’s End and link mining tracks, moorland, canals, beaches and chalk ridges all the way back to Herne Hill Velodrome?

Once there’s a destination, the ride changes. It stops being another loop and becomes a puzzle. A woodland track reaches an old railway, which crosses a town. A canal leads to a bridleway, the bridleway climbs onto a ridge, and an unremarkable lane gets you through the next awkward gap.

When that line works on the ground, it’s enormously satisfying. Go far enough and gravel becomes a way of crossing a country. Not efficiently, admittedly, but you see far more of it: villages, rivers, old industry, ancient roads and the odd bits of Britain most people pass at 70mph.

It also needs rhythm. I’ve raced mountain bikes and cyclocross for years and I’m happy wrestling a bike through something unpleasant, but 100 kilometres of wrestling gets tedious. A good route lets you properly move on fast chalk, firm bridleways and old railways. Then it roughs up for a while with a steep climb, a sandy heath or a grass track that looked far more convincing on the map. That’s fine, as long as it opens out again. Harder isn’t automatically better.

When everyone stops talking

My version of gravel isn’t a gentle pootle. Given a decent track I like going quickly, and I like a long day, especially the point several hours in when everyone has stopped chatting and the group is just moving together.

The bike is filthy, the legs are complaining, you’ve eaten most of a petrol station and the Wahoo insists there are another 63 kilometres to go. That’s when an outing starts to feel like a journey. It’s the Landrace side of my riding: small groups, a brisk pace and somewhere worth getting to.

But I’m far too easily distracted for speed to be the point.

Especially by pubs

You can design the most beautifully engineered route imaginable and it will still be comprehensively defeated by a rose-covered pub on a village green, particularly if the menu looks good. There’s something very right about arriving dusty at a pub you’d never have found if you hadn’t ridden there.

So you stop, eat more than is sensible and eventually remember you’re meant to be riding somewhere. Sometimes you set off again. Sometimes the pub wins and you take the train of shame home. Either way, it’s been a good day out.

Why gravel riding works so well in London

Adventure cycling is usually sold with mountains and deserts, and all of that is brilliant. But London isn’t Girona or Colorado, and it doesn’t need to be. There are no hundreds of kilometres of pristine gravel sweeping towards the mountains. What we have is messier, and I think more interesting. You have to work at it. Some tracks go nowhere, some disappear, and occasionally you follow one for a while, swear at it and turn round.

What you get in return is hours of woods, fields and forgotten corners, mud, wrong turns and hills you’ve never crossed, and you’re rarely more than half an hour from a station.

That doesn’t shrink the adventure. It makes it fit into ordinary life. Wake up in South London, catch a train, ride somewhere completely unfamiliar and be home that evening wondering how you fitted so much in.

You don’t have to travel very far to feel as though you’ve gone somewhere.

And every now and then you turn a corner and find a manor house, a pillbox, a giraffe, two blokes fighting with swords or a way out of purgatory. You never know where the track really goes or what it used to be. That’s probably why I keep following them.

Charlie Codrington
Hidden Tracks Cycling