The map above and the one below are both the work of Dāvis Viļums a Latvian born Londoner who over a period of 5 years cycled all the streets of central London.
In total he cycled over 10,000 miles over the course of 1,200+ individual cycle journeys.
As someone, who walked the Tube back in 2015, I love these sorts of London challenges.
You can leant more about the why below:
Why?
I am a passionate cyclist, and I love the streets of London. Most of my travels are daily 25-minute rides to work. Over time my route became boring. I decided to make it a little bit more interesting by taking the parallel streets on my way there. I bought a map of central London and started to colour in the streets to mark the routes that I have taken. And then I got obsessed with it.
And here’s more on the process:
How did I do it?
In the beginning, I used the “London A-Z Map & Walks” map. It covered a significant amount of central London, but it wasn’t enough, and the shape was not regular.
So I found the “London Super Scale A-Z Map” that was rectangular and covered a larger area.
An essential thing for the map of my choice was that streets are laid out very accurately. Including some irregular times off, overall it took me four years to visit every single road on the map.
When I started this hobby, it took me 30 to 40 minutes to do the route. Later it expanded to 2 hours to get to the office when I tried to reach the furthest places on my map.
One of the main goals was never to be late for work. From the beginning, I planned to visit not only the main roads but every single accessible mews, yard, park trail, and a path that was possible to go through.
I used Endomondo app to have a proper record of my journeys and proof that I have been there.
After every trip, I prepared my next route in Google maps where it was easy to adjust streets to the next ones and mark points to revisit if I missed something.
And how he felt doing it:
How was it?
The most satisfying feeling I got when I found a shortcut in some of my trails.
It was like finding some portal that links two separated parts on the map. There were some obstacles, like road closures or construction works, that sometimes prevented me from accessing the streets.
I marked all of those streets as necessary to visit later when the street was accessible again (like London bridge station surroundings and few streets around Barbican etc.).
Occasionally I found my route trough yards and gardens that are not visited by passersby very often.
If anyone asked how did I get there, I had to pretend to be lost. I take traffic and rules very seriously, so I always have to be aware of the surroundings in unfamiliar places.
If it is not allowed to cycle through the park, I always push my bicycle instead.
And how he created these videos:
Wrapping it up all together
I exported all my tracks from the Endomondo app and put together in a single video. Now we can see how I gradually covered all the visible space on the map, and the result was very pleasing. It resulted in thunderstorm type of effect where each path looks like a lightning flash, that reveals London’s street grid.
He also has a very detailed Medium post that outlines exactly how you can create these types of maps.
Conclusion
That was an enjoyable waste of time, and I liked every bit of it, planning, executing and then colouring in the streets and paths where my route took place. I found it a great way how to discover new areas in London and familiarise all the boroughs of central London. This journey for me made every corner of central London feel like home.
And some Q&A From a few of his reddit posts:
Q: the question was how you managed to not have your bike stolen?
A: No, but since I ride the cheapest possible bike, nobody is interested thou. The drawback – it took me 3 bicycles to do this. The last one lasts already for 3.5 years. Good fella.
Q: Did you plan all the routes you took the last 5 years so you can complete this street grid?
A: Yes, I planned my route before every ride.
Q: Do you have any data for total miles, time spent, etc?
A: It was about 10,000 miles (16,000km) in 1200 journeys.
Q: What was your favorite street?
A: I loved cycling in Alexandra Street Estate, Bromton Cemetery, but Regents Canal route is my favourite.
Q: At what point did you decide you had to ride every street?
A: At beginning I just wanted to mark every street that I have ever visited on physical map. But I really wanted to color in some streets every day. So I had to follow along and visit new streets to satisfy my need.
For more on Viļums’ work have a look at:
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