Walking Class Hero
Welcome to Walking Class Hero a regular blog about walking and the walking environment. Whether you like walking on your own, with friends or in an organised group this blog will cover it. It’ll embrace walking in cities and towns and villages. Walking in the countryside and along the coast and up hills and down dales. Walking through parks and by rivers and across heath and down and moor. It’ll comment on public rights of way, access to open country, permissive paths, public urban space and countryside protection. Basically if you can walk there it’ll be in this blog.
We’re Second Class Citizens (from walk magazine’s Spring 2010 edition)
I’m prepared to bet that anyone who regularly walks around towns or cities will have had times when they felt like a second-class citizen. Because when it comes to walking in today’s UK, you’d be forgiven for thinking that our political masters and mistresses seem to view every other form of transport as superior to the humble pedestrian. Take London, for example, where I live. Every working day people make 7 million journeys on foot here. Many of these walks are made to connect with other forms of transport such as the bus or tube, but nevertheless that’s a lot of walking. Without these journeys London simply wouldn’t work and it hardly seems sensible to treat this many people as second-class citizens, does it?
Well, just try tackling Vauxhall Cross (pictured above), a busy transport hub on a junction of main roads which sits just outside the Ramblers’ central office. You’re not spoiled for choice: you can either cross on the level, use a bridge that spans Kennington Lane, or take the subway. If you use the bridge, you’ll probably still have to cross the busy Albert Embankment afterwards, so many pedestrians then elect to jaywalk.
But what the planners really want to do is drive you underground, out of the way of traffic, into a confusing subway system, effectively burying the problem. The walker certainly knows their place: out of sight, out of mind. I often find myself humming The Jam’s 1980 single “Going Underground” when I take this route. It really is unsatisfactory (the subway not the song), and gives you no sense of the area nor any opportunity to buy from the local shops.
Subways are not the only problem. Head a little further down the road and you come to a set of innocuous-looking traffic lights at the junction of Chelsea Bridge, Pimlico and Hospital roads. This is one of those three-phased crossing points where you’re not entirely sure which line of traffic is going to head off next or which way it’ll go. But there are no green man indicators to guide you, so crossing becomes a complicated and dangerous ballet between pedestrian and car, leaving both angry and confused.
Of course, London is not the only UK city centre blighted by misguided planning that saw the car as king and is now further handicapped by the lack of political will to change things. In fact, councils up and down the country need to move this issue higher up the political agenda. To return to The Jam’s Going Underground, perhaps ‘the public wants what the public gets’ and until we all start letting politicians know it simply isn’t good enough, we’ll continue to get treated as second-class citizens.