Sunny days like today are rather the exception in London, so we use the day for a bike ride. It starts at Embankment tube station in the heart of the city, right on the Thames. One of the oldest Cycle Superhighways, the C3 cycle path, runs along here, connecting the west of the city with the east. When it was set up in 2010, it was still light blue, and in some places it still is today.
Luckily, the traffic planners quickly realized that paint on the street had never prevented a careless driver from illegally parking, and they have now separated the two-lane cycle path from the roadway with curbs wherever possible.
Along with rickshaws, commuters in suits, tourists on rental bikes and the inevitable MAMILS (middle-aged men in lycra), a woman pedals along the Thames towards Parliament. Things get short at Big Ben, because the beautiful cycle path, where it winds around the famous Parliament building, briefly disappears into thin air in the heaviest traffic. But if you bravely keep to the left, you will find the cycle path at the end of the building complex, at Victoria Tower Park. Here, make a brief stop at the statue of Emmeline Pankhurst, the famous “suffragette” who won the right to vote for women in the kingdom over a hundred years ago.
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