Stratford Streets

Boxing Day called for a little bit of fresh air and with the Elizabeth Line closed, I took my folding bike out for a trip to Stratford (East London) via the District Line for a little post-Christmas cycle safari.

I caught up with Dermot Hanney, one of the people behind the London Route Plan Roll cycle network map, to have a look a few things going on in the Stratford area and I'll cover three things in this post. 

First was a look at the A118 Romford Road where an ambitious 4.5km project by the London Borough of Newham is underway to transform its section of the corridor between Stratford and the edge of Ilford.

It had been a while since I'd been to Romford Road and while we didn't cycle the whole length of it, progress seems a little slow at the Stratford end, but it is delivering a project that adds some wide one-way cycle tracks which are suitable for side-by-side social cycling. We cycled east on the section built from Vicarage Lane, although the westbound side is still under construction. The crossing shown above is near Dyson Road and will provide a connection between the eastbound and westbound cycle tracks to maximise access to them and local side streets.

It was great to see forgiving kerbs, decent floating bus stops and rain gardens, although the lack of radius kerbs where the cycle track changes direction is quite an annoying feature of many UK designs - can nobody design curves any more? The surface regularity was also poor in many places which shows that it was laid by hand and not machine. I hope this can be improved elsewhere. 

Not wishing to cycle back to Stratford in the westbound where the works were ongoing, we hopped to the south of Romford Road into the new West Ham Park Low Traffic Neighbourhood which commenced as an experimental scheme in November 2024. The scheme is bounded by the A118 Romford Road to the north, the B164 Vicarage Lane to the west, the A114 Upton Lane to the east and West Ham Park itself to the south. 

There are four new modal filters such as the one above on Ham Park Road near Fairland Road which removes east-west traffic that should be using the main road network. The scheme is managed by camera for the benefit of emergency services vehicles and local blue badge holders, and as such it was a shame to note that someone had vandalised the signs. I always prefer bollards to cameras and this is one of the reasons why, but in any case, it has removed the through traffic and if retained, creates a great way for local people to access the Romford Road cycle tracks.

The scheme also relies on existing and long established modal filters such as the one above between Ham Park Road and Devenay Road which was established 40 years ago in 1984, and has bollards. Interestingly, this was created using planning powers rather than highway powers which was sometimes the route used for environmental improvement projects of the time.

The final thing to report on was the ongoing work on Westfield Avenue which is transforming a dual carriageway built for the 2012 Olympics into something a bit more fitting for the mixed use legacy development; although it is incredibly annoying that money is having to be spent on this again when we should have got it right the first time. Westfield Avenue is an important road within the Olympic development as it provides motor access to lots of parts of the development as well as bringing bus routes to the area.

Westfield Avenue always felt like a windswept wasteland and from a walking, wheeling and cycling perspective, a place that nobody would wish to spend any time at. However, there has been a huge amount of development in recent years and the changes are really needed to rebalance the place function as well as to actually provide decent cycling space as can be seen in the photograph above.

From a cycling perspective, the street is getting a two-way cycle track which is good for social cycling and it has a nice smooth surface. Of course, being two-way, it makes it harder to access the side of the street without a cycle track, although there is much needed access to the Westfield shopping centre. The project has already had lots of new landscaping with rain gardens added that have really changed the feel of the place (above).

To the north of of the current work section, there is a hill and so it was really interesting to see stepped rain gardens being built (above) and which use little weirs to help control the flow of water through the system (below).

The design details have the feel of something Transport for London has had influence with in terms of some of the detailing, black asphalt for the cycle track, but especially the annoying stagger between a crossing of the cycle track and the road at the project's southern end (below). 

Anyone familiar with the development of cycle tracks in London can see some of this commonality in many other schemes from the last decade which I guess is OK for consistency, but it has built-in some annoying features such non-forgiving kerbs and a lack of colour differentiation between cycle and driving space. I'm probably being a little over-critical here, but I do think London could improve the detailing on some of its projects.

What is true about Westfield Avenue is that this will be an amazing transformation of a dual carriageway, and perhaps a template for changing lots of others across the Capital. When you stand at the northern end of the current works and look back (above), you can certainly see the huge amount of space that was given over to motoring!

There is lots going on around Stratford and assuming Newham holds its nerve and the investment continues, the area is increasingly improving its liveability, and the sustainable mobility offer to visitors. I'm looking forward to visiting in a few months time to see how things are progressing.