I live in the city... there I said it. One of the least cool things to say when you are into gravel riding. The urban jungle is hardly a place that conjures up images of ripping trails and exciting terrain, but please hear me out on this because I'm sure I'm not alone. In fact I know I'm not alone because I've met plenty of city-based riders looking for the space in the centre of the venn diagram of somewhere local that's also fun to ride.
But let's back up a bit to how I got here, I'll try and keep it quick. I moved to London in 1995, which seems an age ago. As a late 80's mountain bike convert I found myself commuting inside the city and travelling out of the city to mountain bike in the Surrey Hills. Fast forward to about 2015 and things were starting to change. Family commitments meant that the hour and a half each way to get to the mountain bike trails wasn't the most efficient use of time for a Saturday's riding. Also at about this time gravel bikes had begun to morph out of the cyclocross bikes we had been riding. Wider tyres and disc brakes really changed the game for me at this time. This combination had my brother and I looking differently at the terrain near our North East London houses. Ok so this local terrain didn't have as much greenery and elevation as far off destinations but it was close and if you looked hard enough there was gold (or at least dirt) to be found on our doorstep.
The final driver was when Andrew (my brother, best friend and cycling companion since I started riding) came up with North London Dirt. This is an annual fundraising event we have put on since 2018. Heading off from St Marys Centre (the place we raise funds for) the riders head out for a loop of roughly 70 miles.
In the first couple of years I tried to get out of London as fast as possible, taking the quickest route, but then things began to change, we all know it's about the journey and not the destination so why not try and make the route out and back as fun as possible? This meant looking for alley-ways, cut-throughs, river paths, quiet roads and slightly scary places where who-knows-who-owns-it.
We got into these liminal places in a big big way. These hinterlands where nature and concrete clashed. Places where there was a beauty, albeit a slightly brutal beauty, as the wild flowers couldn't be contained by the factories and industrial sprawl. We got a bit obsessed, to the extent that Andrew and I even produced a newspaper called Superstore Wilderness celebrating it, but that's a story for another time.
What these places also came to represent was what to look for when scouting routes for North London Dirt. The more of these places I could link together the happier we were, and so it seemed were the riders who headed out each year. The constant search for the road less travelled had truly begun.
On Building Urban Gravel Routes
I've refined my technique over the years but there's not really any magic formula to it. All I do is spend time looking at online maps and then seeing how this plays out in the real world. I try not to be afraid of getting it wrong because sometimes there's something really special hidden amongst the slowly thinning urban sprawl. It could be the end of a cul-de-sac that leads nowhere or it could be a doorway to Narnia that fires you into a small wood with a twisty trail that snakes between factories. Or you could chance upon a stream that meanders beneath motorway flyovers, the drivers above oblivious to the small path that follows the green banked river below them.
RWGPS is my tool of choice when I begin planning at home, largely because I know what I'm doing with it by now and can't see a reason to change to something else. Switching between different mapping overlays, looking on satellite images and using Google maps to peer down paths at what might lurk further down. This will be how I start to form a route. I'll then go out and see how the first iteration rides, what the flow is like and whether there are any (or indeed many) dead-ends. I will also be looking around for things I may have missed while trying to map the route. On the ground there may be an enticing byway or a new trail that runs alongside a road. It's all about being adaptable and open to seeing what could improve the route out in the real world.
For me one of the interesting things about gravel riding is that everyone has their own take on what it means. For some people it can be a broken road covered with a little mud washed out from fields. For other people it can be rough enough to blur the lines between gravel and mountain bikes. Having come from a mountain bike background I often wander closer to the gnarlier side of things and regular riders on North London Dirt have come to expect the unexpected and sometimes more technical lines when they head off. This was easily visible in the latest iteration of the event.
The NLD 7 route had riders heading onto what was pretty much a mountain bike trail in Epping Forest. A steep route with wet roots and plenty of off camber corners. It may be generalising slightly but from the stories we heard at the end you could tell which direction most people had come to gravel from, it was either from the mountain bike side or the road bike side.
The refining process can continue over numerous months as I will try and avoid as many busy roads, nasty intersections or places that never seem to dry out. Experience has shown that running our event in mid May means the trails may not fully be dry, so I try to choose a route that isn't too boggy and runs as fast as possible even in the wet.
What does this mean for you?
Possibly nothing, as you may live somewhere that has stunning trails running from your front door. But maybe you live in a city or on the edges. If you do then I hope you are already looking at where you live and how you can find something special close to hand. Yes it can take a few attempts to get a fully dialled route but the satisfaction is huge.
In the wide expanses of the countryside it's easy to come up with a great loop, however for us urban dwellers it takes cunning and effort to make something special, but who said life was meant to be easy?
