Sunday at Bill's Mother's: 22nd September 2024
A step change for strolling? This week we hear from South Yorkshire walking strategist Nicola Marshall about the paths ahead. And how about opening the gates on another city centre river?
Morning. A revelatory city centre stroll with our old friend Simon Ogden today, along another interesting stretch of urban riverside. In this case, particularly interesting because if our politicians make the right decision in a week or two, we could soon all get to amble along a rewilding Porter Brook nearly all the way from the ring road to the railway station.
I’ve caught up with Nicola Marshall, the very active South Yorkshire active travel programme director, to try and find out what’s happening in her plans to get the county walking. And, it’s Secret Seating time again, so scroll to the bottom (not just yet though!) to potentially claim a virtual gold medal for the winning answer.
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Reopening the Porter
Bobbing out of the bushes at the water’s edge, a Grey Wagtail darts above the riffles of a stream in Sheffield city centre.
“One of our guides has a party trick here,” says Simon Ogden of the Sheaf & Porter Rivers Trust. “He gets out a small rod and catches a trout. I’ve never seen him fail.”
We’re at Matilda Street Pocket Park, 200 yards from the Leadmill, and at this point, thanks to some judicious stone movements and planting, the Porter Brook is rewilding to behave a bit more like it did before a city grew over it. You often see Grey Herons at Matilda Street, Simon says.
Simon’s here to show me how the opportunity has arrived, for our elected representatives particularly, to ensure this small stretch of river can be rewilded and opened up to the public all the way to the ring road.
There’s already a small temporary ‘permissive path’ that almost no-one knows about from Sydney Street past Radio Sheffield to Shoreham Street and the station. But behind a tangle of walls and wire is a much simpler path already built that just needs a bit of work and will to open up along the riverside.
We turn back and cross Matilda Street and find the gate to the next stretch of river path is conveniently open. Usually, the riverside path behind it is barred to the public. We continue along the path, behind a set of flats and the Birdhouse tea room, up to another gate, this time locked, which could lead out to the next stretch of river alongside the temporary car park beyond.
Over the wall from the car park and student flats, the Porter here has not yet been naturalised and as Simon puts it, the “channel to keep the shit moving” is clearly visible. Many of our urban rivers were industrialised by stone and concrete to aid the flow of effluent in times past. Here are sections of built channel, around two feet wide, simply to ease the flow of ‘solids’ to the Don half a mile away.
There’s also the striking Cinder Hill Weir, gushing down behind the recolonising plants and spiders. That’ll need some work in future to allow fish to pass, says Simon.
In October, the planning committee will see the objections, from the Sheaf & Porter Rivers Trust and many others, to an application to continue the temporary car park here, on Sidney Street. Simon explains how temporary car parks are a simple money raising scheme for landowners while they wait for a chance to develop a piece of urban land.
In this case, the Trust say the original permission for the car park ran out in 2019, so any extension to the parking application should also bring back the riverside path that has been on the council’s plans for years.
Since the car park is basic and unmarked, a nice new path by the river needn’t lose any lucrative car parking spaces, but it would (along with reminding the landowner to open the gates and build a ramp to the next stretch of path) open up a long stretch of the Porter for people to enjoy. The Trust are more than capable of finding some river renaturalising funding to bring fish, herons and wagtails back too.
Simon takes me upriver, where we clamber over a wooden barrier onto the next section of the riverside trail. The Platform building landowners here and their contractors were supposed to leave a slope and lovely river path after development. But Simon shakes his head at the steep bank, and the gaps in the stonework and railings. There was a gentlemen’s agreement to improve all this, he says, before the workers left the site never to return. Again, it seems the planners could probably do more to ensure this public pathway is brought up to standard.
At the far end of the trail, there’s a brick wall where the Porter disappears under the Decathlon car park. Simon believes the culverting here may have been a wartime rush job, and the alarming hole that appeared down into the river one night a few years ago is a sign of the condition of the culvert.
It’d be better to build a bridge and open up the river so customers could stroll along the riverside to the store’s canoeing and swimming aisles, he says. Decathlon seem open to the idea, he adds.
That’s one for the future, but the downstream path to the station really just needs public and political support to open up for the burgeoning city centre population to enjoy.
There are pubs and cafes appearing along this stretch of riverside, among the gaming venues and sports shops and city apartments. This part of Sheffield is becoming a new Kelham Island, says Simon. Now we just need to welcome back the river.
Baby Steps
South Yorkshire has £160 million to spend on walking, cycling and wheeling schemes between now and 2027, Nicola Marshall tells me. It might even be more once we hear the new government’s transport plans by the end of the year. So what are we going to do with all that money, since the government’s Active Travel England agency has decreed that: 50% of all journeys in towns and cities should be by active modes by 2030.
Just imagine: for every stream of rush hour vehicles at Abbeydale, there’ll be a peloton of cyclists riding along the Sheaf Valley trail. For every driver heading to the gym, there’ll be a runner stepping out on their way to the moors. For any car with a passenger you see on Chesterfield Road, you’ll see a parent walking with their child.
“What we know is that walking will play by far the biggest part to reach that number, more than cycling,” Nicola says. As the South Yorkshire active travel programme director, (working with mayor Oliver Coppard and active travel commissioner Ed Clancy), she’ll be trying to get the data on how much walking there is now.
She’s already got some figures from the city’s BetterPoints scheme showing the average walk to a local bus stop in Sheffield is twelve and a half minutes. So if public transport improves, walking and the better health it brings, also increases.
Which leads to one of the other big ideas behind the South Yorks Walks agenda: public health. Economists have been talking this week about how the nation can never improve productivity until a lot more people off work with health or mental health problems are well enough to work again, and since inactivity is behind many of the nation’s public health issues, getting out for a stroll is seen as a cheap and cheerful miracle cure for us and our national economy.
You may remember our earlier post about the old (and misleading) 10,000 steps a day figure needed for good health: 4,000 is a more attainable target with proven health benefits. But Nicola has a new even smaller target, this time from research at Sheffield Hallam University.
“Being more active has a massive impact on health. 2,500 steps means an 8% reduction in the chance of death. That’s maybe 20-25 minutes activity a day, and then the benefits go up incrementally from there, with 7,126 steps a day being the optimum, with a 50% reduction in cardiovascular risk.” Reset your step counters now.
But the biggest impact on public health is when you get someone from zero activity to 10 or 20 minutes a day, she says. “So how do you make that meaningful for people? How do you sell walking?”
Nicola has to sell walking to politicians and officers of varying opinions in all the South Yorkshire authorities when spending that £160 million (or more), but she seems determined to shift the travel focus from the blokey idea that the only journeys that matter are steely eyed workers heading to desks and factories. Why aren’t elderly folk going to their dance class or families heading to the park just as important?
“Traditionally we think about transport as routes into towns and city centres, but that doesn’t capture lots of journeys, to schools, nurseries, shops, or to friends, for example,” Nicola says. “But those sort of trips make up the vast majority of trips that people make, because we know that only 18% of journeys are commuter journeys across the UK.”
There’ll be a focus on neighbourhoods, on making journeys in your local area safer and nicer, especially for families and children.
“What Ed and I and Oliver want is to make things as easy and as safe and as attractive for pedestrians as possible,” Nicola says.
Examples will be better crossings, more trees and green spaces, more school streets where school drop off cars are banned in favour of kids and pushchairs at school opening and closing times. We could see the cheap and easy side road zebra crossings (as trialled in Manchester) that remind drivers to give way to pedestrians as they turn into residential streets.
She tells me her team may even move to a radical idea of asking locals what they actually want in a neighbourhood before the plans are drawn up.
Before we see all this, the South Yorkshire authorities are drawing up their Local Walking, Wheeling and Cycling Investment Plans which should appear in the spring, along with a set of county-wide design standards, which should address problems like interminable waits at pedestrian crossings, dark subways where locals fear to tread, and dangerous flared junctions.
It still feels a lot like baby steps for those Sheffielders who’ve been lobbying for years for a city fit for all travellers, not just car commuters.
Nicola tells me our new national transport secretary, Heeley MP Louise Haigh, is very much behind these ideas. “But I think the new administration have indicated really clearly that it's very much up to local authorities how they want to implement things,” she adds.
So, after some backward steps in recent years, is Sheffield Council now willing to stand up for a city of walking and wheeling neighbourhoods?
What’s On Out There (from Sunday 22nd September)
A tiny selection from our regularly updated What’s On Out There in September news and listings post.
Sun 22nd - Sheffield Castle talk - Festival of the Mind (FOTM)
Tues 24th - Friends of Porter Valley work morning
Weds 25th - Longshaw Wednesday 5m social walk
Thurs 26th - Rewilding the River Don talk at Weston Park Museum with Prof. Ian Rotherham
Sat 28th iRunner talk about running technology - (FOTM)
Sat 28th - Restore Nature Now walk with Sheffield Environmental
Sun 29th - Sounds of Summer concert at Whirlow Brook Park
Secret Seating (8)
A new bench for our vigilant viewpoint fans. Last month’s double header brought a flurry of guesses: speedy gold medals for both seats to Jeremy Boucher, with Nerissa Kisdon just behind in silver for the Whirlow picture sent in by reader Ellen, and Charles Heatley has a creditable bronze for the same answer.
Today we have a long overlooked rustic bench leading to a mystery pathway in a very popular city green space. But, where is it? Answers in comments please!
Thanks for reading. And remember: FFS! Forward to Friends, and Subscribe!
Far too much space in the city centre is taken up with car parks. Multi-storeys are a good idea, but those acreages of parked cars you can see on overhead maps or by walking around the city should be replaced with green spaces. Sheffield may be one of the greenest cities, but we have the Peak District and many leafy suburbs. The city centre itself is quite impoverished when it comes to green (or blue) spaces.
As a nation, we have become fat, lazy and unfit. I’m no gym bunny, but in spite of being a pensioner, I don’t find it difficult to walk into or around the city centre from any of the existing multi-storeys, or from the bus stops. I appreciate that there are people for whom walking is difficult or impossible, and obviously provision should be made for them. However, so many people just don’t think to walk any distance, something which is particularly damaging for children. I’m sorry to say that until the age of about 50, I never thought to walk instead of driving a couple of miles.
We have a health crisis in this country, and so many of us are heading for a miserable old age, needing looking after because we’re too unfit to stand/walk/get up out of a chair/go to the loo without help etc. You never think you’re going to become an old person, but unless you die first, you will!!