There are various options to cycle from London to Paris.
The shortest route is about 200 miles from London and uses the Newhaven to Dieppe crossing. The ride via Calais is longer – in the order of 300 miles from London, depending on the choice of route through northern France.
The typical route from Calais heads more or less due south, with Amiens at around half way. Instead, my route takes a relatively easterly sweep, avoiding some of the hillier terrain and taking in beautiful dutch-style landscapes and then rolling countryside, through the Somme region, punctuated by some historic towns of sufficient size to provide plenty of interest and options for accommodation and food.
By starting at St Paul’s Cathedral and ending at the Sacré-Cœur Basilica, this ride is London to Paris “Dome to Dome”.
The link below opens a PDF file which describes the route “longhand” (in 33 pages!). The route is organised as a three day ride, but it can easily be re-chunked and spread over more days. If you can do it quicker then “chapeau” – please let me know via the contact page for this website.
London to Paris via Calais – v2.0 – Sep 17 – LBR
The route was developed for a trip made in September 2016 with Julian Sharples. The following PDF gives a bit more detail on some of the interesting features of the route.
The route was ridden again and refined in September 2017, with Ben Hunziker-Neville joining Julian and me for the trip. The four GPX files below are from this ride and cover the whole route from London to Paris, via Calais. The GPX files are generated from Strava records of the trip, so there are a few sections of GPS signal drop-out (resulting in unfeasibly straight stretches of route!). Where there is a conflict between the route shown in the GPX and the description in the PDF then the latter is the “correct” version.
L2P_Day_1_Part_1_London_to_Dover
L2P_Day_1_Part_2_Calais_to_St_Omer
If you want to try the shorter version of London to Paris, then Dieppe to Paris by Donald Hirsch is the classic route and is a highly recommended introduction to riding to Paris.
Malcolm Wills, 7 January 2018