On a grey December morning, geographer Dan Raven-Ellison leads the way from Southall in west London to Ealing Broadway, past Indian restaurants and car washes, locks and laundry lines, along suburban streets, stretches of the Grand Union Canal and into Walpole Park.
The journey could take 15 minutes by train but that’s missing the point. Raven-Ellison is the founder of Slow Ways, a project to create a network of walking routes connecting all of Great Britain’s towns, cities and thousands of villages.
In January, Slow Ways will launch its website, asking 10,000 people to help walk, verify and review the 7,000 routes that their 700 volunteers drafted digitally during the spring lockdown.
The purpose of the project, says Raven-Ellison, “is to connect the places where most people are – so towns and cities – to where most people want to go to, which is towns and cities” via safe, direct and enjoyable routes. The country is criss-crossed with footpaths but, he says, “they largely go from countryside to countryside through countryside”. And there’s no comprehensive network: the current state of footpaths is, he says, “like a big pile of spaghetti”.
Slow Ways is one of a number of efforts to get – and keep – increasing numbers of Britons walking. According to Mintel, the number of hikers has increased from 16% of the population in 2018 to 23% in 2020, and Sport England’s weekly poll during lockdown showed walking was consistently the most popular form of activity.
There is copious evidence that walking is good for us: studies have shown that walkers have lower rates of depression and that walking with someone can deepen social connection.
“Walking allows us to talk to each other on a deeply personal level,” says nature writer Nick Hayes. “Humans have gone for walks throughout history to clear the mind, and let the conversation wander freely.” En route with Raven-Ellison from Southall to Ealing, the conversation covers Reese Witherspoon and gentrification, cemeteries and the Grand Canyon.
Other big walking projects are also under way. In February, the Ramblers launched its Don’t Lose Your Way crowdsourcing project for England and Wales. It is “about finding historical routes that have been generated over generations and putting them on to modern maps so people can walk and enjoy them,” explains Tom Platt, its director of advocacy and engagement. From 1 January there will be only five years left to add rights of way on to the definitive map (the legal record of rights of way in the two nations) on the basis of historical evidence.
Around 4,000 volunteers have been playing spot-the-difference between old and modern maps. If historic routes don’t appear on the latter, they work to claim them by proving that they used to exist. One recent example involves RAF photography from the 1940s, an 18th-century map and a 1913 book by the poet Edward Thomas corroborating a stretch in Suffolk.
Once claimed, the local authority “effectively has to look after them, and landowners of those paths have certain duties around public rights of way,” says Platt.
Access to footpaths and green space isn’t equal. While, according to a recent Ramblers report, 60% of adults said that better maintained green spaces, including footpaths, would improve their quality of life, only 57% said that they lived within five minutes’ walk of green space. That fell to 46% among adults with a household income of under £15,000 and 39% among people “who identify as being from a black, Asian or minority ethnic (BAME) background”.
Steppers UK, which promotes diversity outdoors, launched this summer as “a response to the type of year many of us were having”, says founder Cherelle Harding, citing the pandemic and systemic racism. “As a black woman, it certainly took its toll on me. I wanted to find a way people could connect, relax and find some good in such a tough year.”
Harding catalogues possible barriers: “lack of representation, access, transport, proximity, lack of exposure, which can result in no interest.”
Oge Ejizu, the London leader of Black Girls Hike, says: “Sometimes the barrier has been not seeing people that look like me actively represented in outdoor spaces, and sometimes it’s not having the means to get to these amazing places.”
Walking is, she says, “something that I associated as a white middle-class pastime”.
Slow Ways will be taking a diverse range of users into account, says Raven-Ellison. Multiple options for each route will allow different users, such as those in wheelchairs, pushing prams or wishing to avoid canals after dark, to choose a journey best suited to them. “The idea is to create a trusted national walking network that inspires and supports people to walk more, for more purposes and, crucially, to go further.”
• This article was amended on 21 January 2021 to clarify that the Ramblers’ Don’t Lose Your Way project is for England and Wales, and that the legal record of rights of way, which is subject to the five-year deadline, is also for routes in these two nations.
