Page 13 - PBCOctober2017

Pickwick Bicycle Club Magazine Volume 14 No.2 October 2017 @13

What do You Know about Britain’s Forgotten 1930’s Cycleways?

by Mr Grundy (Carlton Reid)

I have not seen any records of what contemporary PBC members thought about the
protected cycleways installed throughout the land in the 1930s, but the view from
“organised” cycling in general was that the roadside “cycle tracks” were a menace. “It is
evident already that this innovation is strongly resented by a section of cyclists who see in
it a formidable conspiracy to deprive them of their right of access to the roads,” wrote an
editorialist in The Western Morning News in 1935.

Despite this opposition, the Ministry of Transport went ahead and built 300+ miles of
them anyway. It’s reasonably well known – in certain cycle advocacy circles at least – that
there was a two-mile protected cycleway on Western Avenue in London, opened by
transport minister Leslie Hore-Belisha in 1934. What’s very much lesser well known is that
this was just the first of ninety or so schemes. Today, it’s almost wholly forgotten that this
putative network ever existed, and I launched an online crowdfunded project in order to
research them. I want to preserve a number of them, but also bring a significant number
back into use. Via Kickstarter, I raised an astounding £25,000 to take this project forward.
The greatest number of these cycleways were placed on the new-build radial roads
leading out of London and other British cities and constructed apace in the 1930s. They
were built to a regulation width of 9-ft on both sides of the road and delineated with kerbs.
While most were built beside the new “bypasses” some were built on “trunk roads” through
residential areas, such as in Sunderland, Manchester, Nottingham and Oxford.

Lostock Road, Davyhulme,
Manchester in 1936