Is There Still An Active Travel Strategy?

A post in which I witter on about the politics (with a small p) of active travel. If you find this a bit boring you can skip to the end where there is some local interest in a link to a 1948 COI fi extolling the virtues of the New Towns

A couple of days ago I mentioned the ‘Active Travel Strategy’ had been pulled from the Department of Transport website but not from Department of Health’s. Interesting...

Public health is the reason there needs to be a policy to encourage behavioural change . We need to be more active because there is an obesity epidemic and the costs of dealing with all the related problems, such as diabetes, are rising fast and will be huge. These are costs for the health budget, which has burdens enough with an ageing population and the rising costs of treatments. However the expenditure for an infrastructure to encourage a healthy lifestyle would fall to transport, planning and leisure services departments and they do not necessarily have the same priorities.  The most likely bureaucratic outcome in such situations is nothing - stasis, inaction, a stand-off, followed by some empty gestures to show things have not been completely forgotten, whilst turf wars are fought.

Resolving overall priorities is what cabinet government is meant to be about but at any one time there is a clamour of urgent events forcing the long-term to take its place furtherand further back in the queue.

Especially when the health benefits are not direct and require a number of behavioural changes. It is impossible to say how many cases of diabetes will be avoided by an extra cycle path. You might have an enormous figure for the health implications of doing nothing but that is difficult to transfer to an individual planning application. 

In Victorian times there was a huge investment in public works to benefit public health as drains, sewers and water mains were built. But this was done to eliminate cholera, a disease that could strike anybody of any class.The cost was immediate and staring everybody on the face.  However obesity and health are mostly seen as lifestyle choices and matters of individual responsibility - there is not the same overwhelming urgency for collective action.

All of which is a long winded way of saying that I can understand the slow progress. In 2001 there was a Select Committee report on Walking in Towns and Cities, which concluded that pedestrians have been treated with contempt. Since then there has been little direct action. Cycling has fared a bit better and starting in 2005 there were some demonstration projects to increase the use of bikes in designated cycling towns. But now the body that organised those schemes (Cycling England) has been abolished and the largely positive evaluation report has been deposited in the National Archives 

As far as the Department of Transport is concerned the whole Active Travel Strategy seems to have gone to the same place. It does not help that the Department is car-centric with many of the new ministers pledging to end the war on the motorist. What war was that? As well as walking and cycling I also drive a car and I have failed to see the bullets.

The attitude of the Minister in charge of roads, road safety and deregulation (Mike Penning, MP for, ahem, Hemel Hempstead) is shown in these notes of a meeting he had with some cycling representatives. It does not give one a lot of hope.

But all is not lost. Although walking is still not treated with enough seriousness, there is some momentum behind cycling. The focus is very much on safety because that is an issue with direct impact (and the Times has to be commended for putting so much weight behind their  #cyclesafe campaign ) but if if that can cause a rethink in the provision of separated cycle paths and the design of junctions, we may be able to edge towards Amsterdam or Copenhagen

Actually planning for active communities is not new. It was widely accepted as a good idea in the post war period and was embodied in the layout of the first generation of New Towns (e.g. Hemel), as  illustrated in this rather wonderful COI film of the time. 

2011 Streak Day 241 (Tuesday Aug 30th): Water Gardens

2011 Streak Day 241 (Tuesday Aug 30^th): Walk - 3 miles, Time 1hr 10min, Weather - greyish once more

When I started this 2011 project one of the objectives was to talk about exercise and training, as normal, another was to notice things I found visually interesting and take photographs, but the third strand was pay attention to my home region, especially Hemel Hempstead where I live.

What particularly interests me is the differences between the ideals and hopes invested in the New Town project immediately post-war and the way they are now. I am tremendously attracted to the early idealism but am equally aware that some things have not turned out as planned.

Today’s photo is a good example and it is a disgrace.

You would not guess from the overgrown planting, eroded banks, grass destroyed by too many canada geese, and eroding concrete, that this is a listed in the Register of Parks and Gardens of Particular Historic Interested (in other words it is Grade II listed). 

It was designed by Geoffrey Jellicoe (a eminent landscape architect of the Twentieth Century who was also responsible for the gardens of the JFK Memorial at Runnymead) and planted by his wife Susan, both of whom thought it one of their most successful projects. Interestingly Jellicoe was interested in the way the unconscious influenced all design and in this project admitted being influenced by Paul Klee.

Today you would be hard put to identify the artistic ideals. What should be a pleasant civic space has been neglected over the years and is now a just a scruffy area with water (kids can still feed the ducks so that is OK).

It is an example of how anything can degrade without care and attention. Everything has to be maintained or it starts to fall apart. Changes may be gradual at first, barely noticeable, but eventually they reach a point where you  realise things have become so bad major reconstruction is needed.

It looks like we are now at that point. The Garden History Society had a study day in Hemel on the Water Gardens, a Friends Group is being formed to work with the council to prepare a bid for lottery funding and the council itself is talking of improving the area. But “actively pursued when the cash is available” probably means we should not expect immediate action.

2011 Streak 98/365: Simplicity of design

2011 Streak 98/365:Walk - 3.1 miles, Time - 1hr, Weather - sunny, hot with a very blue sky

A notice board might seem an odd subject for a photograph, even if it is a rather splendid, old fashioned, notice board that probably dates from somewhere around the middle of the last century. But it is not the reason for the photo - it is there to indicate that the building we can partially see, behind it, is the Quaker Meeting House

I chose to show this fragment because the building does not have much of a frontage. There are a few steps down to a gateway, behind which is a small courtyard leading to the main meeting room. The label will have to stand for the whole.

It is a hot day but when you approach the building seems somehow calm and cool. This is an amazing quality common to a number of religious buildings but Quaker building tend to have the extra qualities of simplicity and modesty.  They are not immediately dated by the flourishes of decoration but by simpler things such as the shape and types of window. This building dates from 1718.

When I look at it I also think of the design philosophy of the New Town, which was recently highlighted for me by a few incidental sentence in an excellent article about the architect James Stirling

(in the immediate post war years) The public sector, now a spent force in architecture, was dominant. Like almost everyone who had talent, even Stirling spent a short spell working for the London County Council. Architecture was meant to be about social service, producing the best housing and schools affordable in an age of austerity. It was a noble vision, democratic and modernist, but it was the vision of puritans.

The architects of the New Town took the ethos of simplicity and plainness of form (along with the reductionism of modernism) and extended it over 6,000 acres. The result was rather dull.

The Quaker Meeting House is not