Heavy rain the day before and forecast for the last Friday of the month threatened to dampen spirits and numbers, but the weather mercifully held off all day, and this meant that a large crowd gathered on the southbank for the August ride. Estimates as the ride was visible and stopped in a single bloc on the long straight road out towards Stockwell were around a thousand riders, possibly more.
The ride headed off and turned westwards on Belvedere Road towards York Road, avoiding the IMAX roundabout. Some riders were interested to visit Springfield Park in Tooting, a new public park which had opened up to the public only in July. The ride went south west, through Clapham High Street and down towards the southern tip of the Common. At this point, the heavens opened up, briefly but heavily, causing the people at the front to change their minds and turn around. The ride forked right, with the intention of going back towards the river, but ended up still going west, ending up at Wandsworth Common, and then eventually looping back over the north side of the Common.
At the junction with Clapham Park Road, a small group of approximately 50 riders moving faster turned right towards Brixton. As they were not corking the junctions and not waiting for the remainder of the ride behind, they ended up being separated from the main body of the ride, as the riders behind did not see where they had gone. The main group headed north along Clapham High Street, where they stopped and waited at Stockwell Station, for the faster group to join back up. Some riders in the splinter group had turned on their location tracking in the Telegram group, so this made it easier to spot and hold up for them as they arrived. This shows the importance of slowing down and corking junctions if you are at the front of the ride. If you don’t do it, you might get splintered off if the main body of the ride goes another way.
At Oval station, after some celebratory cheering in response to a huge truck horn, the ride turned right towards Vauxhall bridge. Again, some of the front riders charged ahead, without corking roads for those behind, which led to three cars and a bus being in the middle of the ride, before the ride could turn into the Vauxhall gyratory. This led to some tension between riders, with disagreements over letting cars through. But “filtering” between traffic causes bottlenecks and slows the ride down, as Mass needs to be viewed as a large wide vehicle rather than the way an individual cyclist would ride. One rider pulled a phone out and started filming another during a disagreement, which is not acceptable behaviour on a CM ride, and the rider was rightly chastised for this.
The cars and bus were eventually let through, and peace and calm returned. Unusually there was no midway “pit stop” on this ride, probably due to the weather being a bit unpredictable and people wanted to keep moving when the ride was around Clapham. At Vauxhall Bridge, most people assumed that the ride was heading back towards Southbank, but instead the ride headed north across the river, and up towards Marble Arch via Victoria and Hyde Park Corner. For the past few years the ride has generally avoided the west end, for several reasons (too many roads to cork, too much filtering through traffic, and problems with phone thieves using the ride as cover to steal smartphones from pedestrians). However this ride showed how far CM has improved over the last 18 months, as the ride stayed together cohesively, and headed east along Oxford Street in a bloc, with only happy vibes from riders and observers.
The ride then headed south on Charing Cross Road, pausing briefly at Cambridge Circus to the bemusement of tourists and theatre goers, again staying together and not filtering through traffic. At this point the ride had been going for 3 hours and more people had splintered off to go home. At the eastern end of the Strand, some riders wanted to stop at the new-ish pedestrian plaza in front of Somerset House, but four police bike riders were parked there, watching the ride approach. So the ride crossed south over Waterloo Bridge, and ended up back at the start point at around 22:45. One of the sound system riders plugged in a mobile decks unit into his rig, and people stayed under the arch of the bridge dancing until well after midnight, when the batteries on the ran out and the music stopped.
All in all it was a great ride. There was no “wider issue” like a white bike being installed for a killed cyclist, but the atmosphere was overwhelmingly positive, the ride stayed together apart from one splinter at Clapham, which eventually recombined, the west end trip was without any friction with drivers or pedestrians, and there was a decent amount of people still there at the end after 3 hours, which shows that many people are willing to treat it as their “Friday night out”. Roll on the next one!
