POTHOLES AND PAVEMENTS, A BUMPY RIDE ON BRITAIN’S NATIONAL CYCLE NETWORK, LAURA LAKER (2024),
An engaging account of the uphill struggle to create cycle routes in the UK
Bloomsbury Sport, 978-1-3994-0646-8 £16.99 15 x 23 cm 304pp
Some years ago, I made pilgrimage to the National Cycling Network’s (NCN) embryonic route. Opened in 1984, it connects Bristol and Bath via a circuitous, repurposed railway track.
Without sat nav, the start proved elusive – its in a suburb, a mile or so east of the Bristol’s centre. When I finally located the route, it was clearly popular. Promenading families, untethered dogs and tricycling tots were in abundance. My speed, as a consequence, was well below what I might have averaged by road, a route that would also have been three miles shorter. The path disgorged in a trading estate west of Bath – where I became totally lost, despite being a frequent visitor to the city.
I struggled to imagine anyone with cause to travel from one city to the other choosing this route . My leafy Somerset pedal was rich in its own pleasures, of course. To paraphrase Voltaire, however, the NCN is not ‘national’ is any comprehensive sense, is not ‘for cycling’, in any exclusive sense, and is not ‘a network’, in any interconnected sense. What is it, then?
It is to this question that Laura Laker applies herself on an enjoyable and informative spin around the NCN’s routes, high and low.
What she finds is that the NCN is still as much of an idea as a reality. From the late 1970s the dream of a national network existed only in the minds of a handful of volunteer path builders. Then, in 1995, a successful bid to the newly launched National Lottery netted an extraordinary £42 million grant – and an improbable fantasy grew wings.
Spectacular as that sum of money sounds, in road-buildings terms, alas, it is pocket change. Just one mile of highway can cost three times the value of the total award. With match funding and great creativity, the initial grant enabled the routes that exist today, 13,000 miles of them. It studded paths with intriguing works of public art, and geared up the volunteer army that maintains the existing network.
Beyond question, it is a dramatic improvement on what went before – by 2020 4.9 million people used the NCN to make 765 million trips. As Laker finds (but does not quite say), however, ‘the sporadic leisure-journey patchwork’ would be a more honest description of what exists, even today. Little wonder. Those working to promote such routes have the odds stacked against them. They face, she says: “disinterest, paralysis or obstruction by a system set in a car-centric culture that blindly pursues roadbuilding at the expense of all else”.
She uncovers this on an electrically-assisted pedal around routes all over Great Britain, meeting NCN’s pioneers and some of the volunteer army on whose labour the network depends. Her choice of mount is redolent of the lens that she brings the subject – that of those who don’t yet use a bicycle or are among the least likely to do so. Perhaps time-pressured, point-to-point journeys – such as my Somerset frustration – were never the NCN’s most important role, she suggests?
Laker catches the NCN at a moment when the charity behind the network, Sustrans, is vigorously promoting schemes all over the country, despite having ousted its charismatic founder, John Grimshaw.
A rush of interest in active transport spurred on by the Covid lockdowns of the early 2020s is receding, however, and existential issues hang over the NCN. A quarter of its network was lopped off in 2020 as it was deemed to be ‘crap’. Whether it can adapt provision to users such as those in wheelchairs, or other vehicles used by differently-abled people remains to be seen? Is it even plausible for such an ambitious project to be the domain of a charity with none of the statutory powers enjoyed by those who maintain our roads network? And what sort of cycling should be the focus – leisurely jaunts, or journeys to work?
As such this is an excellent primer on the UK’s state of development as an enabler of peddled transport – much improved from 40 years ago, but decades behind the Netherlands, Denmark, Germany, Belgium and even France. Laker brings the authority of a journalist who has covered this patch for a decade and builds into her narrative encounters with Grimshaw, Chris Boardman, Ned Boulting and many others.
She concludes with a well-considered ten-point plan for the NCN to fulfil its potential. Wide readership of her book would be a useful step to making that a reality.
TD January 2025