Central London CTC blog

Seven of us met up at Maidenhead station. It should have been eight but one rider missed out when her train from Ealing Broadway was cancelled. The group had a transatlantic flavour with an American, a Brazilian and a Canadian amongst our ranks. We left Maidenhead by a complicated cycle route and then crossed the bridge over the Thames and rode along the Thames Path. We made brisk progress and got to Eton before our planned lunch stop, “The Waterman’s Arms”, was open. So, instead, we followed the Jubilee River to Dorney and ate at “The Pineapple”, a pub that specialises in an enormous range of huge sandwiches. One of our number was not up to the challenge and needed a doggy bag. We continued along the Jubilee River. This is an artificial watercourse built to alleviate flooding by the Environment Agency but it has been landscaped to look like a natural river. Better still, they have put in a cycle path alongside it.

We then climbed the one major hill up to Taplow Court. The house is a former stately home that is now run by Soka Gakkai International, a lay Buddhist organisation. Its golden age was in the decades before the First World War, when it was a meeting place for the so called “Souls”, an aristocratic and intellectual circle. Sadly, two sons of the house were killed in 1915 in Flanders and the third died in a car accident after the war.
We had a short tour of the house and admired the view over the Thames valley. Refreshed by tea we then rode on past Cliveden, descended to Bourne End and then went on to Cookham to visit the Stanley Spencer Gallery. He grew up in and spent much of his life in the village which was the subject of many of his paintings. After that it was back to Maidenhead on a largely off road route. Rather bizarrely, we passed a statue of a hippo. What it was doing there I’m not sure but it caught our imagination and we took lots of photos. We were back in Maidenhead in time for the 1836 train.