Features / Breakfast with Bristol24/7
Breakfast With Bristol24/7: John Grimshaw
It was only on the morning of meeting John Grimshaw that I realised that most of my daily cycle ride to school with my nine-year-old daughter was along part of the National Cycle Network.
A small sticker stuck high on a lamppost next to the Pump House in Hotwells gave the game away: indicating that this was part of NCN 33.
Next time you are on the Bristol & Bath Railway Path, doff your cycling helmet to Grimshaw for his vision as it was here that the NCN began under his inspirational leadership of Sustrans back in 1979.
is needed now More than ever
When we met at Foliage Cafe in Clifton Village, just a short cycle ride from Grimshaw’s house (outside which an NCN mile marker sits in the front garden), another part of NCN 33, better known as Festival Way from the city centre to Ashton Court, had been closed by developers.
Grimshaw was furious about the closure and had quickly designed a much better diversion route than the one which had been put in place.
Festival Way is part of Route 33 of the National Cycle Network – photo: Martin Booth
No longer at Sustrans, the former civil engineer now heads up Greenways & Cycleroutes, whose mission is – as its name suggests – to develop community walking and cycling routes.
“My central passion is much better facilities for walking and cycling,” Grimshaw explained while drinking a large glass of freshly squeezed orange juice.
“I think it’s really urgent because of climate change, because of the whole issue of fitness and health.
“In Clifton, where I live, it’s overrun by massive cars which are completely irrelevant to the urban area.
“I have been building paths around the place for over 40 years and it distresses me immensely when you get something like the Festival Way happening when a very good and very popular path is just arbitrarily closed.”
Grimshaw’s other current bugbear is the closure of the walking and cycling path to Temple Meads due to the ongoing saga with the Grosvenor Hotel, now partially demolished.
“They opened a bus stop and they could have opened a cycle route immediately. Nobody in the council has done an assessment of how dangerous it is for cyclists to get to Temple Meads.
“So we have an orchestrated campaign against cyclists going on in Bristol now as opposed to something really positive.”
John Grimshaw cites the blocked-off cycle path next to the Grosvenor Hotel as “an orchestrated campaign against cyclists going on in Bristol” – photo: Martin Booth
Grimshaw is optimistic that Bristol’s new mostly Green-led administration will be able to make changes but he says “it will be a huge challenge for them to pull us out of the mire”.
So have his four decades of building paths even made a dent in his home city?
“No, it hasn’t really,” he admitted. “I mean, the Bristol & Bath Path is probably by far still the most popular route in Bristol. And certainly the only one that is available to every sort of person, children, families and so on.”
I speculated that the Bristol & Bath Railway Path is perhaps a victim of its own success. “Well, that’s because they won’t build any more,” Grimshaw countered.
He then returned to what has defined his life’s work at Sustrans and now at Greenways & Cycleroutes: “I always saw building paths as a catalyst to change.
“I always thought that we would build a really good new path, we would demonstrate to the government that lots of people would cycle if they are given the chance and then the government would take over and build really inspiring systems which got cycling up to ten or 15 per cent more journeys, at least in the flatter parts of the country.”
The first ride on the Bristol & Bath Railway Path in 1983, looking towards Owen Square in Easton – photo: Sustrans
In mid-August, a few weeks after I spoke to Grimshaw, Bristol City Council announced their plans for more than two miles of new segregated cycle paths stretching from Bedminster to St Paul’s through the city centre.
If national and local government had shared Grimshaw’s vision, it could have been something done decades ago.
“I’m almost of the idea that it was a bad idea to build the Bristol & Bath Path because it let government off the hook,” he said.
“Of course, it’s not a bad idea because without it, we would have had absolutely nothing.”
Illustration by Lucy J Turner
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