Trails of the Riverbank
The most comical of Sheffield’s historical ‘cycle tracks to nowhere’ was in Attercliffe, where it literally ran into a brick wall for several years. But one of the most famous still exists by the River Sheaf, where pedallers are beckoned from Broadfield Business Park along a wide red track until a few picturesque twists and turns later they’re faced with a perplexing fence and an expanse of brambles.
This wouldn’t happen on a ring road extension, say the baffled cyclists.
But in the new world order, it won’t happen on active travel routes either, as Sheffield City Region confidently wait to see if they’ve been awarded £7 million (or more) for high quality continuous routes for walkers and cyclists from the government’s next round of emergency active travel funding.
Should the funding arrive, a ‘substantive’ route along the Sheaf Valley will be completed by next March, from Woodseats Road to Sheffield station. But how will it get there?
“We have a concern that in the past we’ve had bits of cycle route put in along parts of the Sheaf and then apparently due to a change of policy, not continued,” says Viv Thom of the Sheaf and Porter Rivers Trust.
“There’s a lot to be said for finishing what you’ve started, but to the new improved standards.”
Much of the route could be achieved off road by improving parts of the existing Sheaf Walk, say the Trust.
“None of us are against repurposing road space,” says Viv, “but if the city’s aim is to create a viable continuous active travel route along the Abbeydale Road corridor as quickly as possible, and if the route is pleasant, with better air quality and away from conflict with other traffic by following the river and quiet roads, surely that would be even better?”
The old style of cycle and walking route planning was to take advantage of ‘planning gain’ funding: when a developer planned a large supermarket or a business park, for example, they could only go ahead if they agreed a set of related environmental benefits, such as a 200 yard stretch of cycle route that might initially end in a brick walk or bramble patch, until the next developer came along.
Hence the ‘temporary’ cycle routes to nowhere. Those days are gone, it would appear, with the government’s announcement of significant and ongoing funding for continuous, useable cycling and walking routes. And hopefully this time next year, Sheffield will have such a route along the Sheaf Valley into town, with an extension following all the way to Totley and Millhouses.
Part of the potential Sheaf Valley route was annexed over recent months by local families.
“The Virgin Gym car park became our beach,” says Steve Frazer, whose family brought picnics down from Meersbrook to cycle, scoot and skateboard around the flat car park, with other lockdown families a few metres away.
“We spoke to so many people who said how wonderful it was not to have traffic noise and pollution, and to hear the wildlife, before we released the world back to the car again. So I think it’s important to make changes now while we still have a memory of how good it can be.”
Steve is a landscape architect for local company Urban Wilderness, and says the national mood in favour of improving cities for walking and cycling gives us the chance to do so much more too.
“This is an opportunity to improve spaces more generally so we can transport people around in an efficient and pleasant way, while maximising a space’s potential in other ways too,” he says.
Planting to help wildlife, drainage for flood alleviation, seats and play areas for residents and people who pass through , for example, are all parts of the ‘green infrastructure’ that will maximise the potential of a public space such as an active travel route, often at little extra cost, says Steve Frazer. Sheffield’s ‘Grey to Green’ routes in the city centre are good examples, he adds.
“If we make these linear corridors a nice place to be, if you make them quiet, rich in wildlife and more palatable to people, it will encourage more people out of their cars to use them.”
Especially since many journeys by bike into the city are usually quicker by bike anyway, he adds.
Simon Ogden, chair of the Sheffield Waterways Strategy Group, has been saying this kind of thing about our river routes since he and his colleagues began the Five Weirs Walk project a generation ago.
Sheffield’s rivers were its source of power from the 1500s, Simon explains, so when coal and steam arrived the builders of the city’s turnpikes (which eventually became modern highways like Abbeydale and Penistone roads) chose cheaper land away from the old riverside workshops.
Deindustrialisation now makes that riverside space available for the walks and routes that couldn’t be built when the rivers made cutlery.
“We now know the impact active travel has on urgent factors like public health, mental well-being, climate change and the need for activity,” says Simon.
“The Five Weirs Walk took more than 20 years to complete, but progress can and must be much quicker than that now.”
The current plan appears to favour using part of the existing Sheaf Valley active travel route, but existing users note the challenge of cycling (or running with a pushchair) under a low railway bridge on a blind corner with no pavement, and negotiating a narrow stretch of Little London Road with cars and vans all over the pavements. Can this route be made fit for purpose by March 2021? Possibly only with parking changes and road closures.
But the potential of the Outdoor City’s riversides is clearly there, with existing walking, running and cycling stretches on the Sheaf, the Rother, the Porter, the lower Don, the Blackburn Brook and the Rivelin, or within the proposals for the Upper Don Trial commuter and leisure route from the city centre to Stocksbridge.
If we want them, we really can have quiet, dynamic travel routes full of wildlife and people enjoying themselves, insists Steve Frazer.
“What’s not to like?” he says.