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I rode the Downs Link last weekend on 700x28c with no problems. I had an absolute blast - passing mountain bikers on a touring bike with mudguards and a Carradice Barley, hunkered down on aero bars is a lot of fun!

Also, I can't help thinking this would be a lot of fun as a night ride from Shoreham to London.
My route from last time: https://cycle.travel/map/journey/107557
https://www.strava.com/activities/2436332443

Is there any chance of joining you on this?

Agreed. I rode it last week on my touring bike. 700x28c "off road" was a lot of fun. I had no problems at all. It's a great day ride from London. Stan's was also great.

There was a spectacular crash at the South end of Albert Bridge this morning. There was a motorcycle completely under a car. There was a second motorbike parked up on the pavement and a lot of cyclists and another car stopped and lots of people on the phone. It looked as though there were no injuries and both motorcyclists were up and walking about, so I've no idea what happened.

I did this ride a few years ago and it was great fun, but the arrival at the stones was completely ruined for me by the drunken party and the massive amounts of litter.

It's a really good route and the route to the station afterwards was also great. It's a tough ride, long and pretty hilly in places, but I'd be totally up for it again, especially if it avoids the solstice party.

So you can reach the bottles?

Witnessed an incident involving a dog in Battersea Park this morning.
A cyclist in front of me was brought down by a dog running across his path.

Since I was some way back and the dog ran towards me, I helped another woman catch it. It was clearly frightened and probably hurt.

I walked up to the cyclist, who wasn't hurt, just bruised and scuffed. To find the dog owner had also been cycling and was now arguing with the cyclist over who's fault it was. It was quite an extraordinary argument, since the dog owner was absolutely adamant that he wasn't responsible for his dog's behaviour in a park.
He was getting quite aggressive with us both and eventually the cyclist agreed that since he wasn't hurt he was just going to go. I reminded him to check over his bike carefully, which got me another round of abuse from the dog owner "Who do you think you are? Why are you even getting involved? This has nothing to do with you etc...", then he turned around to look for his dog. Literally for the first time in 10 minutes he shows some interest in his dog. "Why has that woman go my dog?" - My response, because you are being an irresponsible dog owner and not taking care of your dog!"

At no point did he apologise to the cyclist or go and check on his dog.

Me and the other cyclist rode off and out of the park, so I have no idea what the woman looking after his dog thought about it, but I also hope the dog wasn't hurt as it looked quite young and nervous.

I'm always super careful about loose dogs in parks, but you can never entirely guarantee that you can avoid them.

For once the new Rapha pack looks like good value for money compared to the pricing of the Ortlieb and Specialised frame packs.
rrp is £85-90 for the medium or large compared to over £90 for the Specialised and around £80-100 for the Ortlieb.

That looks amazing. Have you got a route for it?

Head out towards Arundel? You can use the reverse of this route: https://cycle.travel/map/journey/49948
It worked pretty well for me and was a nice route, lots of lanes and quiet roads.
The route from Arundel to London is also pretty scenic until you get closer to town: https://cycle.travel/map/journey/49947 to be honest, I'd probably hop on the train at somewhere like Tadworth.

I was staying in a Gite not far from Lisieux
This is the route from the Ferry to where I was staying, it shows the way out of the Ferry terminal and inland.
https://cycle.travel/map/journey/62391

These are circular routes we developed whilst we were there:
https://cycle.travel/map/journey/62398
https://cycle.travel/map/journey/62397
https://cycle.travel/map/journey/62395
https://cycle.travel/map/journey/62394
https://cycle.travel/map/journey/62393

To be honest you could probably set off in any direction, it was all pretty good.

Normandy is fantastic, scenic, lovely roads, rolling terrain and easy to get to, take the night ferry from Portsmouth to Caen. Getting out of Caen is easy, take the bike path right out of the ferry port to the Pegasus bridge, turn left...
I've got a whole bunch of mapped out routes if you're interested.

It's one of my favourite areas to explore. I really need to spend some more time putting together routes in the area. Would love to explore off-road, but don;t have a mountain bike/gravel bike. The bike is really only suited to road use, although it can cope with a bit of decent quality bridleways. I've been out almost every weekend over the past few weeks and even on the cloudy days it's been glorious.

This company sells quite a few different mounting options: https://www.76projects.com/shop/
Decent prices and UK made too.

Lovely write up. I was in the same area myself this weekend. Rode out from South London to North Stoke via Amberly, across the valley and over the Gurkha Bridge to South Stoke (agree about the nightmare kissing gates!) and then around the back way into Arundel.

The route I took is here: https://cycle.travel/map/journey/49947
Only a minimum of comedy off-roading on 28mm tyres. About 100km all told.

I agree that rain on glasses at night is pretty horrible, especially in traffic or around bright lights. However, I've found that a good squirt of silicon-based furniture polish helps prevent the rain from beading on the surface of the lenses.
I've also put a wipe of clear silicon sealant along the fingers of all of my long cycling gloves, so that I can wipe the lenses - windscreen wipers effectively. That also works really well.

Yes. I stopped wearing contacts for cycling as I rode longer distances. Too many dry itchy eye problems. Maintaining proper hygiene is vital to avoid potentially catastrophic eye infections. Prescription photochromic glasses are just so much easier.

I've often thought that this is the better way to go. If you took something like a Tortec ultralite which is only about 500g in the first place, you could just strap the bag straight onto it that would get the centre of gravity lower and you'd have a lot less hassle with the load shifting about when you are climbing. OK, so rack bags aren't cool, but there are quite a few light-weight racks that have a lot of "excess" struts that could be cut off. I wonder how much you could cut down a Blackburn EX1 rack and still have it survive?

I went out and rode a good chunk of NCN21 this Sunday, picked it up near Crystal Palace and rode down as far as Eridge before running out of time and having to bail onto the train to get home.

I was riding my Audax bike, so skinny 700x28c road tyres, full length mudguards, Carradice Barley, Campagnolo triple with a lowest gear ratio of 30x29, the works.

A lot of the route is off-road and pretty hilly (Strava says up to 38%, but I can only imagine that was a very short section), but even so it was rideable and had drained well after the recent rain. The flatter sections were a complete blast, I was able to cruise at 25-30kph easily. It would be a lot of fun on a hard tail MTB or gravel bike.

In terms of access, There's a lot of fiddling around on back roads until you get up to the brilliantly named Skid's Hill Lane and from there to Redhill it was an absolute blast - if I did it again, I'd just straight line it on main roads to that point. Between Redhill and Crawley it's a bit of a chore through industrial estates and urban back roads and then you pick up The Worth Way (an old railway line converted into a rail trail and finally at East Grinstead, The Forest Way (another Rail Trail). These were a bit dull if I'm honest, fast, flat and not very interesting, but they'd be great with kids in tow.

I met a lot of French families coming the other way on fairly heavily laden mountain and euro-style touring bikes. What they made of steep gravel climbs on heavily laden touring bikes I can't imagine.

I'll be back later in the month to try to finish it off, but the bit up to Redhill would be a good spot to try backpacking and sleeping out.
The route is on cycle.travel: http://cycle.travel/map/journey/479

Maybe a good forum ride for the future as well?

Where did you see this?

If you want to have a go at this sort of riding, take up audax and build up to the longer rides. 400km takes you beyond what most people can do non-stop. You'll need to sleep for a bit. A 600km needs a few hours sleep, but can be done in a weekend. Then once you're comfortable at those distances, you can go after the 1000km+ rides. I've never really gotten past 600km.

Replacing the internals costs £65, so much cheaper!

There's always a few on PBP. I remember descending on the dark, in pissing rain, and being overtaken by someone on a Brompton in a super aero tuck!

It would be interesting to see what causes the most failures for these ultra distance rides.
Tyre sidewall tears and rim failures seem pretty common, much more so than I remember from audax.

I use an eight speed for commuting. It's a great hub, but it's already lunched one set of innards after about 8,000km, so I wouldn't regard them as reliable. It's OK as a commuter hub, but I don't think I'd want to race on it. Ironically, although the Rohloff is expensive, it would be cheaper than a high end derailleur set up!

Did Chpt3 give their bikes to the Tour de France commentary team on C4? I saw Ned and David Millar riding them in some of their short films. Our is there some connection to David Millar's clothing range?