Ride Velo has never been to Romford before and, an hour into the journey, we were seriously considering why we were enduring the traffic jams to get across London to a place that we’ve successfully managed to avoid for several decades without worrying about it. If we’d known what an Aladdin’s cave we were about to enter we would never have questioned the sanity of spending a beautiful spring Sunday afternoon stuck in the car negotiating the dubious driving skills of the inhabitants of Essex, rather than enjoying the country lanes of the Kent Alps on a road bike.