This photo set, the 80th in my ongoing project to photograph the whole of London by bike, which I began last May, is the second of three that precedes and follows on from a set I published last July, entitled, “The Olympics Minus One Day: Photos from the Frontline in Stratford” (and see here too), in which I cycled east from Whitechapel along the A11 — Mile End Road, which becomes Bow Road and crosses the A12 on the way to the Olympic Park along Stratford High Street. In the Olympics set I published in July, I then cycled up to Leyton, along the A12 at the north of the Olympic Park, and then back south via Hackney Wick, Old Ford, Poplar and the Isle of Dogs, stopping in on Greenwich before returning home to Brockley.

Following the previous set, “Adventures in History: The Mile End Road,” in which I passed various historical landmarks on the way to Queen Mary, University of London and the Regent’s Canal, this set begins at the “green bridge” that crossed Mile End Road, and then traces my journey along Bow Road, past the derelict St. Clement’s Hospital, and other landmarks, to Bow Church, marooned on a traffic island, and the Bow Flyover, which vaults over the A12, where bikes were exempt from the Olympic traffic ban, and I had great views, from a highway that is never normally empty in the daytime, of the Olympic Park, the Lea Navigation (the River Lea), the A12 and the northern reaches of Bow and Stratford. Read the rest of this entry »

This is the 79th photo set in my ongoing project to photograph the whole of London by bike, which I began last May. I currently have around 8,000 photos to publish, to add to the 1,500 or so I have already published, so it would be fair to say that it’s a project that is slightly out of control, in which it has proven far easier to get out and about taking photos, than it is to upload them.

Part of this is because I insist on spending time researching the places I photograph, so that my record of London is not just photographic, but a text-based historical record as well. However, it is also because, from the beginning of the project, I have been responding to the long years I spent indoors, writing on a daily basis about Guantánamo, followed by my illness two years ago, with an insatiable desire to be outdoors, on a bike, as much as possible. Read the rest of this entry »