London: where the streets are paved with cycling hazards?
"In Thames Street, London, there's iron bars in the kerb. These were originally 'wheel stops' to prevent carriages rolling backwards down the hill."
So claims a Facebook post that pops up in my feed with annoying regularity. It's to be expected, really. I do a lot of writing about niche street furniture. But the posts always get hundreds of likes and comments, suggesting they have substantial reach.
We can all guess why the post goes viral. Everyone likes to see a bit of the "ye olde" surviving in modern London — its why ghost signs are so popular. But most of the comments are people who want to point out the hazard to cyclists. I suspect we'll get a few on the Facebook post for this article, too.
But is it true? Does Thames Street really feature these iron protrusions? The answer is "No", but with an interesting addendum.
First a technicality. Central London does not have a Thames Street. It has an Upper Thames Street and a Lower Thames Street, but nothing called simply Thames Street. We'll ignore this, however, because most people, not knowing where the dividing line comes, refer to the whole stretch as Thames Street.
Were you to walk this grim, traffic-laden dual carriageway, you would not see iron bars protruding from the kerb. What you will find is a two-way segregated cycle lane. This is a road where the cyclist is relatively well-catered for, and not endangered with random sticky-outy hazards.
If you know anything about this road, then the whole story is daft. Thames Street (Upper and Lower) was utterly rebuilt after the Second World War. It was widened, realigned and resurfaced. It is the last street in London where olde-worlde pavement curiosities might survive. Plus, it tracks the former shoreline and therefore contains no appreciable gradients (save for those created artificially by modern underpasses). The story about carts rolling down the hill is clearly spurious.
BUT... there is some truth in the tale. If we instead take a look at Thames Street, Windsor, then we can spot the unusual kerbside arcs of metal. You can see them in Street View.
Thames Street in Windsor is on a significant gradient. The notion that these metal bars were put in place to prevent coaches from rolling downhill makes sense here. The explanation is corroborated by Windsor and Royal Borough Museum, who say "Horse-buses waited here on Race days to take people to Ascot".
The metal hoops could, in theory, pose a hazard to cyclists. However, they're on the upward side of the road on what is a very steep hill, so most cyclists would be moving slowly. That said, this side of the road appears to lack any lighting, so the obstacles may be hard to see at night.
To be fair to the original poster (Exploring GB), their linked article does mention that the bars are next to Windsor Castle, but they are also described as "London" throughout (the place name appears 22 times, to Windsor's single mention).
In conclusion, London's Thames Street most certainly does not contain these odd features, but Windsor's Thames Street does. Case closed.
