21 mile commute, plus the opportunity to pick up some hardware that a supplier failed to deliver yesterday meant I had my first opportunity to ride CS7. Is it supposed to be surfaced?
It's a disgrace at the moment, particularly heading north from Clapham South up to where the A24 meets the A3. Dodge those potholes!
I confess that despite my peculiar love of London bike routes, those blue superhighways have eluded me (actually, I lie, I did once try to follow CS3 to Barking but got lost in a car park, which with hindsight, was a message). This is partly because I live in SE London and, as such, any transport initiative is only likely to reach us 20 and 50 years after the rest of London. It's almost like the powers that be have wrapped us in some kind of temporal barrier. It could be 2030 outside and the rest of London is zipping around in a super network of shiny Teflon-coated pneumo-tubes, popping out like flatulent weasels in exciting locations like Belsize Park and Morden. I suppose we do now have tube trains that aren't tube trains, but they're nice and orange, like someone crossed Dale Winton with a Ginger Nut and extruded it in a hollow train-like form. That, children, is proper science. Some people claim it goes nowhere useful, but it'll be mightily handy should Croydon ever decide to invade Hackney. Hackney, for the record, has better beer, so I'm not complaining about Dale's Gingery Non-Tube. The temporal barrier theory would explain the way people in Shoreditch dress.
For some reason that might not have extended beyond morbid fascination, I did however, take CS7 from Holborn all the way to Colliers Wood yesterday, sampling the delights of a 'superhighway'. The experience was a bit like riding across the dark side of the Moon, and that's not just because Tooting is the natural home of Earthside Clanger contingent (obviously). Sections of it seemed to have been strafed by high calibre weaponry. There were potholes so big that I was worried someone (probably the French) had used South Clapham as a nuclear test site. Fortunately, as the entire length seems to double as parking spaces, I did manage to miss much of it. I was pleased to see that they had put some effort into the junctions, recreating a high-octane version of Frogger for Generation Nintendo cyclists who had become bored of a cycling in a straight line. Certainly, no one would want to suffer a fatal attack of ennui outside Stockwell station.
I did, I confess, expect some kind of reward on emerging in Colliers Wood. Needless to say, I was disappointed. Given the absence of a ticker tape parade, any kind of onward connectivity would have been nice, rather than the strip of blue just deciding that it had had enough, it wasn't going any further (and I couldn't entirely blame it). Nope, not an inch. You're on your own, it effectively said, abandoned in a place that I'm not even sure requires an apostrophe or not. I'd have minded less, but I had no idea how to get home from Colliers Wood, and the sky was rubbing gravelly sleet into my eyes. In the end I was forced to cross miles of bleak, pebbledashed badlands, like some suburban Siberia, until I stranded up in Carshalton Beeches, where at least I could figure my way home from (because my evil cats came from there, and there's also a black hole under Sutton which will eventually pull you in, no matter how lost you are in south London).
In summary: blue in places, not super, and not a highway.
