Many of us daydream about escaping into an imaginary parallel universe. The good news is that Britain has its own genuine, and literally parallel, universe that we can escape into at any moment. It’s the National Cycle Network that threads its way quietly and meanderingly over, under and alongside our gridlocked main roads and our daily lives.
Once you try it, you’ll fall in love with supposedly ‘broken Britain’ all over again. You’ll be reminded that it’s a country of dog-walkers, rivers, farms and front gardens. And you don’t have to wear Lycra to do this. You just need ordinary clothes, plus KitKats, Thermos and sandwiches, and off you trundle at 8 mph.
You might have seen the National Cycle Network signs, red on blue, beckoning you off the road on to a smaller lane. Once you notice one, you’ll start spotting them everywhere, discreetly glued on to lampposts all over the country. Route 1 meanders from Dover to the Highlands; Route 2 from Dover to St Austell; Route 3 from Land’s End to Bristol; Route 4 from Greenwich to Fishguard. Route 61 happens to go from St Albans to Windsor, and there are many others. The long ones would take years to complete at my rate of 25 miles per day, but completing them is not the point. Pedalling through Britain at its most gentle, from settlement to settlement, is the point.
The routes were designed by the charity Sustrans, which might put you off. I hate the name Sustrans, which sounds vaguely like a Latin gerundive but is in fact an unattractive copulation of two words. And I don’t like being made to feel I’m doing a bike ride in order to pursue a sustainable mode of transport.
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