The paradoxes of London cycling

Docking station near Warren Street

The Barclays cycle hire scheme has been running for a year. The Londonist blog shows that the scheme has had mixed reviews. The bikes have proved remarkably robust and very few have been stolen. However the IT system for  hiring and charging is unreliable. Some users have been frustrated by the fact that they cannot reliable find a bike to hire when they want one or that there is no dock free at the end of their journey. However others have been inspired to buy their own bikes.

The scheme has also stimulated technical ingenuity, such as the London Bike Share map devised by Oliver O’Brien, a researcher and software developer at the Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis (CASA), an interdisciplinary research group at UCL in London. This continuously tracks and displays the number of parked bikes and free docks at each of the docking stations. 

It might seem that Transport for London wants to promote cycling, yet today there has been a big protest on Blackfriars Bridge because TfL's traffic engineers are making the bridge more dangerous for cyclists by adding more lanes of traffic and raising the speed limit. The political campaign been led by bloggers who have exposed the failure of TfL's engineers to treat all travellers as equal while giving priority to the smooth flow of motor vehicles. They seem to ignore the fact that, over 24 hours, cycles make 16% of the traffic. That rises to nearly 36% of the traffic in the morning rush hour.

So TfL provides the means to cycle - at least for some - but does not engineer the roads so that cycles have their rightful amount of space to ride safely.

The Limehouse Hydraulic Accumulator

The Hydraulic Accumulator at Limehouse

Walking along the canal the other day I spotted a man sitting on the balance arm of a lock and typing away on an old-fashioned, manual typewriter. I used a similar machine for years until I moved onto a daisy-wheel, electric typewriter. These long standing technologies were swept away when computers came along - though we still use the QWERTY keyboard. The last company making typewriters has closed.

There are other examples of once widespread technologies that have largely vanished. Hydraulics may still be very important in control systems for machinery such as excavators.  However networks of hydraulic pipes no longer distribute power locally to drive machinery as they once did in the days before electricity was available.


Alongside the DLR viaduct behind the Limehouse Basin is an octagonal tower dating from 1869. This was built to regulate one of the first hydraulic power systems. The hydraulic system was installed to drive all the cranes, capstans and lock gates around the dock between the canal and the Thames.

Hydraulic systems use a liquid under pressure to drive machines. In the nineteenth century a central pumping station with steam engines kept the system topped up with water under pressure. A weight-loaded accumulator was used to regulate the pressure. Up the middle of the accumulator tower was a huge iron cylinder. Inside the cylinder a piston loaded with 80 tons of gravel pressed down on a reservoir of water.

None of this works any more and a spiral staircase cuts through the cylinder leading to a public viewing gallery. The tower is only open to the public occasionally, for example during the London Open House weekend.

Mile End Park

Wild flowers in Mile End Park

We seem to be enjoying a spell of summer weather in London. This made it all the more welcome to come across a wild flower meadow on my canal walk from Limehouse last week. The park is long and thin. It runs alongside the canal and is intersected by main roads and railways. The impact of the roads can be limited by using the towpath and also the remarkable green bridge which is undergoing maintenance at the moment.

View from the green bridge

Pond beside the Ecology Centre

The park features an Ecology Centre built in a curving mound of earth under a walkway. I have never seen the wind turbine working in any weather but the pond and surrounding reeds attracts wildlife.

This welcome open space in Tower Hamlets offers ecology students  the opportunity to learn more about aquatic and grassland habitats.

BT Tower

BT Tower from Regents Park

There has been a lot of fuss about media ownership in the last few months but this was not on my mind as I enjoyed a fine view of the BT Tower from the park today in the sunshine. Most of the little dishes on the sides of the tower may now be decorative, but, even in these days of digital technology, most broadcasters at home and abroad rely on the tower to get their TV programmes into our homes.

This Wikipedia page provides the technical details about the tower which is no longer freely open to the public. However the revolving 34th floor is now available for special events. It is also open, from time to time as part of the Open House London and for selected charity events.

I was lucky enough to be enjoy the views from the rotating floow a couple of weeks ago when I joined an event to celebrate the progress made in York with the development of the National STEM Centre which works with partners, including BT to support education in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM).

London Eye and Westminster from the rotating floor of the BT Tower (click image to see details)

Haggerston Gas Works

Gas holder by the Regent's canal

It was only a few days ago that the Guardian published an editorial in praise of gasometers. This was followed in a later edition of the paper by a letter pointing out that the name is a misnomer because these great, expandable storage tanks are not for measuring. Apparently this objection was raised as long ago as 1805 by John Southern who was an engineer for the Boulton and Watt Company. He is reported to have written: "I do not like the name, for it is not a meter. You may as well call a pool a hydrometer".

Two gas holders in Haggerston

Walking along the canal today I passed the frameworks surrounding the 'gasometers' left over from the Haggerston Imperial Gas Company. I am old enough to have visited a working coal-gas plant when I was at school in Rugby. The smell all around the plant was particularly foul with a mixture of tarry and sulfurous fumes. 


A BBC news article dated 1999 describes how 'gasometers' work and explains why they are no longer needed because equivalent amounts of gas can now be stored in pipelines under pressure. Apparently Transco was planning to dismantle pretty well all gas holders in the ten following years, but clearly this has not happened. This article suggested that the name 'gasometer' is based on the fact that the more gas they hold, the bigger they are. In other words, the height of the storage tanks is a measure of the volume of gas stored.

The Regent's canal

Canal locks at Limehouse

A four mile walk from Limehouse to Islington along the canal today. The towpath was busy with walkers and cyclists and there more boats than usual going though the locks. The number of Nicholson canal guides on view suggest that quite a few of these boats were exploring new territory.


The Regent's canal opened in 1820 to link the docks on the Thames at Limehouse with the Grand Union canal's Paddington arm. The canal was built too close to the coming of the railways to be a financial success but commercial traffic continued until the 1960s. 

Old Ford Road lock

Apart from boating, cycling and walking, the canals still have technical importance today. Long lengths of the towpath of the Regent's canal from Limehouse through Camden, for example, are laid with concrete slabs which cover high voltage power lines helping to distribute electricity to London. 

Boat entering Islington tunnel

The twelve locks between Limehouse and Camden raise boats from the Thames to the level of a lock-free pound that stretches 21 miles to the nearest lock on the Grand Union main line. 


I must revisit the London Canal Museum soon. It tells the story of the canals and also acts as a reminder of the importance of the Regent's Canal in supplying ice for London from Norway in the nineteenth century.