You’ll Never Walk Alone
Most visitors to London tend to travel on the famous underground, or ‘tube’, but walking is also an option. It’s good for both your physical and mental health, and it offers a more relaxed way of enjoying the capital’s numerous attractions. London has an impressive network of walking routes and that network is expanding in this, the year of the Diamond Jubilee and the Olympics.
Jim Walker is CEO of both Walk England and Walk London. He thinks that walking is a great way to enjoy London, and to help the environment:
Jim Walker (Standard British accent): When we talk about trips and the way people move around this city, like any other city in the world, actually, generally speaking, we all make about three trips a day. And, normally, at least one, probably two, of those trips includes some connection to your home. And that pattern of trip numbers has been the same for, actually, thousands of years across most of... well, certainly, the Western World. And 80 per cent of all trips under one mile are walked. And that’s probably the same in most cities, actually, around the world as well. And yet it’s an invisible figure very often in statistics because we do it all in such an obvious way, we don’t think about it, and so very often people don’t even measure that and they certainly don’t talk about it. The opportunity, however, is that there’s about 27 million short-distance – you know, I’m saying about one mile – car journeys that are made every day in this city, in London, that could also be walked. So 27 million additional trips that could be made. And, in addition to that, we’ve got a tube network and a bus network which, in many places, is at capacity, and very often that congestion is caused by people who are only on those networks for a short period of time, doing trips which could actually be... they are less than a mile, and could be walked.
And how does London’s walking network compare with those in other European cities?
Jim Walker : There are sort of networks in places like Brussels. I’ve been talking to some people in Vienna recently who have a network of paths and, of course, there’s some really good routes around Copenhagen and some other sort of European towns, but what people don’t have, that we do have here in London, is the public rights of way network. It’s very unique to us, as a country, and it’s, historically, come as recorded paths that people have a right to walk, in order to access between places that, historically, used to be between home and church, or, you know, between the church and going to work. They’re quite small corridors sometimes, but they have a legal right to be maintained, to be signed, to be kept open by the local authority, and for people to use them, and nobody else has this network. And I think it’s that uniqueness that has meant that London, I think, probably has the most extensive path network of anywhere in the world.
