Dan Raven-Ellison

Founder, Slow Ways

The Slow Ways network aims to connect every town and city in the UK, via a network of existing footpaths. Where the Don’t Lose Your Way campaign endeavours to save historic paths, Slow Ways shows a way they can be used and improved for the future. slowways.uk

“The ambition with our road infrastructure is for it to be flat, easy, direct, accessible, with good mapping and signage. Similarly, there’s an ambition with cycling to create safe, joined-up cycle routes. But with walking, even though everything is linked on the ground, it’s not connected in people’s minds or imaginations, in the signage or on the mapping. It’s all really fragmented, even though in reality it’s not.

“I remember going on a walk from Salisbury to Winchester. There are signs telling you that you’re on the Clarendon or Monarch’s Way, but there’s no sign directing you from city to city. It might take you five hours, but there’s no invitation, no cue. When you’re walking in the countryside you’ll have signposts and roundels all over the place with arrows pointing off in different directions, but none of them tell you the town the arrow’s pointing towards.

“We saw the increased levels of activity at the top of Snowdon last year. With Slow Ways, we can help people discover other parts of the country, which might be just as adventurous, a bit quieter and more affordable. That kind of network did exist before the car and then we forgot about it.

“The first lockdown was a catalyst for the project. A year’s worth of volunteering was done in a single month to create 7000 routes. If it hadn’t been for lockdown with all these walkers compressed into their living rooms, unable to go outside, fantasising about the journeys they wanted to take, then we wouldn’t have made progress that quickly.

“We know the routes work on paper but we don’t know if they work on the ground, so as soon as we can we’ll invite people to go and walk them. We want as many people as possible to check them so we can become more sophisticated in the information we’re sharing. Can we survey enough routes to tell wheelchair users that this is a barrier-free route? Can we tell people the cow-free way to get from place-to-place?

“The more people who get out and walk the routes, the more verified and trusted they become. It’s a largescale, slow-burn, long-term project. We’re eager to get on, but we’re not in a rush. The long-term ambition is for them to become part of our culture, our way of moving around the country and the way in which we create and connect communities. The more people we have walking, running, wheeling these routes, the better they’ll be and the more likely it will be that we can persuade both local and national government to invest better in walking.

“We have expectations for roads, why is it that walking is left in such a weak position?”