Category: Walking and Cycling

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Why walking & cycling are essential services to support recovery and help get Manchester back on its feet during Covid19

Image from @juststepsways

This is a humanitarian, as well as a health crisis.

Tens of thousands of people have died in the UK, with millions on the front line providing health care or other essential services; with unprecedented numbers relying on foodbanks and social support, and many more with no or reduced income.

Despite this only 9% of people want to go back to how it was – and high up among those things we all want to keep are the quieter & safer streets, cleaner air, and greener neighbourhoods brought about by the drastic reduction in road traffic due to lockdown.

Here’s my proposal for the critical role walking and cycling can play in our renewal – enabling us to rebuild a cleaner, greener & more inclusive future, keeping the best of what we had and leaving the worst behind.

(best viewed in presenter mode)

Published 4 May 2020

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Discovering nature’s secrets are right on our doorstep during lockdown. Join me on a 10,000-step trip round mine!

Click here for a full page version of the map

In the week since Lockdown, all our horizons have closed in.

For me, the 1km radius around my home has become my whole world.
I already spent a lot of time in it, working from home a lot, and car-free.

So many ‘freedoms’ have been withdrawn, the world seemingly ‘shrunk’, due to Covid19 – yet strangely it seems like I’m seeing everything around me in close up with a new observer’s excited eye.

It’s like because the world got smaller, our eyes got bigger, our ears more sensitive. It’s as if someone has adjusted the scale on my brain, like the dial on a microscope, to see smaller changes, greater depth.

Is this how we notice? Is this how we re-attach ourselves to nature?
Is this how we remember that society is hosted, generously, by our ecosystem, not the other way around?

The little noticings that in the past I might have missed, busy on a phone running late on a tram into town, or catching a train to a weekend away; there is no escaping the doorstep now, indeed it is all we have.

Continue reading “Discovering nature’s secrets are right on our doorstep during lockdown. Join me on a 10,000-step trip round mine!”