A warm, sunny day today with no wind. Great day for a cycle ride.

We had pre-booked a 3 hour guided cycle tour with Tally Ho! Bike Tours. They are based in a couple of shipping containers in a scruffy lot in Lambeth, just on the south side of the Thames. There are several companies offering pretty much the same tours but Tally Ho! use Pashley Cycles so that is why we chose them.

Pashley bikes are made by hand in Stratford-Upon-Avon and the designs haven’t changed much since the company was founded in 1926. They are very sturdy, quite heavy steel frame bikes and have only 3 or 5 gears. They have a very upright riding position and you should really be wearing tweed to look the part.

Our guide was a lovely man called Tristan who is a musician and actor when not being a bicycle guide. We were his only customers today so we had our own personal tour. We had chosen to cycle on a Sunday morning figuring that would be the time with the least traffic on the roads.

Thanks to Boris Johnson, former Mayor of London and now Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs in the UK Government, London has an extensive network of cycle paths through the parks, and cycle lanes in the streets.

It was great to be going more than 3 miles per hour, scaring pedestrians with our Pashley musical bells, bouncing over the cobble stones and running red lights like cyclists everywhere. You can see an awful lot in 3 hours cruising around on a bicycle. They have several themed tours, this one covered some of the London classics: Westminster Abbey, Parliament Square, Buckingham Palace (for the changing of the guard), Covent Garden, the theatre district, Archbishop of Canterbury’s Palace, Leake Street, lots of quiet little streets and squares etc.

After a couple of hours we had a coffee stop at an upmarket coffee shop called Notes in Covent Garden. £11.50 ($23) for two rather weak long blacks and sumptuous chocolate brownies.

Last stop on the tour was the Leake Street Tunnel. A very unsavoury looking place under a railway viaduct. It is alleged Banksy, the anonymous graffiti artist and political activist, did some of his work in the tunnel. Now anyone is allowed to do any spray can work they like on the walls and ceiling. Tristram produced a spray can and we both added to the graffiti art. Or perhaps we just defaced it.

Walked back via Piccadilly Circus and Covent Garden both with so, so many people everywhere.