Active Travel England, whose permanent Commissioner is former Olympic gold medal cyclist Chris Boardman, announced last month that they have received a £200m grant from central government to promote walking, wheeling and cycling routes. They have invited local authorities across England to bid for a share-out of this funding.

According to Active Travel’s press release: “Projects will be designed in consultation with residents and businesses to ensure schemes are safe and work for local communities, and the successful projects will be announced later this year. Guidance has been created to help local authorities develop active travel schemes that are well-designed and completed to a high standard.”   

The invitation comes at an interesting time. Hastings Borough Council (HBC) voted by the narrowest of margins in December (15 councillors for, 16 against) to oppose a cycle path through Alexandra Park on the grounds that it was incompatible with pedestrian amenity and safety. The path was being promoted by East Sussex County Council (ESCC) as the central route for cyclists through the town.

Following the vote HBC asked ESCC to confirm that they will nevertheless implement an offshoot of the cycle path, planned to go from Hollington to Silverhill. This path already has government funding and is fully designed to run from Crowhurst Road to Asda. 

However, according to an HBC spokesperson, ESCC have responded that currently they will not consider alternative routes around Alexandra Park and are now reviewing all of their commitments to the cycle routes in Hastings, given recent cost increases. They have told HBC that it may be summer before any decision is made on the Hollington cycle path.

Could an allocation from the Active Travel fund now cover the cost of alternative route around the park? Neither ESCC nor HBC have given any indication yet of any intention to bid. 

Handsome Bicycles, which has sold and repaired bikes from its premises in Harold Place since 2012, has announced its permanent closure in the aftermath of the flood. Manager Harry Wiseman said that the water which inundated the shop on 16 January was visibly mixed with human waste sewage, and has left a stink which has rendered it impossible to work in. The firm will reopen for a final closing down sale as soon as the council’s environmental officer permits it – which may be some time yet.

MP Sally Ann Hart came on a tour of inspection last week, and told Mr Wiseman and owner Rowan Smith: “I’ll do what I can.” However, she did not seem to accept that Southern Water should take any blame. “I had to ask her to leave,” Mr Wiseman said.

To be fair, he indicated that the shop had already been struggling since last summer. “Footfall dropped off horrendously after Liz Truss became prime minister. There’s just no demand. Now the flood has pushed us over the brink,” he said.

High Tide Cycles, trading from Marine Court in St Leonards, is another bike shop that has just announced impending closure for “a mixture of business and personal reasons”. No flooding is involved here, but the demise of both stores at once is a further blow to the town’s cyclists, already dismayed by the recent borough council’s rejection of the proposed cycle route through Alexandra Park.

There was a clear natural cause of the flood which engulfed Priory Meadow, South Terrace and other parts of the town centre, as well as Alexandra Park, in the early morning of Monday 16 January: over an inch and a half of rain falling in a few hours on ground that was already saturated.

The human machinery – drains, pipes and pumps beneath the ground that are supposed to direct water flows from the Priory Stream out into the English Channel – simply couldn’t cope. But whether that was because of defects in their operation, including blockages in the pipes or drains, malfunctioning of the pumps, or a whole system that was inadequate for its task, remains to be argued in the weeks, months, possibly years ahead.

Southern Water, the company responsible for maintenance of the system, issued a statement asserting that “our assets continued to work properly throughout the latest bout of floods”. Alex Saunders, head of their wastewater networks pointed to “months of exceptional rain” which had left the ground waterlogged. Rivers in the area such as the Brede and Rother have burst their banks. “Every fresh fall of rain has nowhere to go,” he said.

The local Met office has confirmed that 40 mm of rain (1.58 inches) fell in the 24 hours up to 9am on the Monday morning – not quite beating the January record of 42.9mm (1.69 inches) set in 1879.

Why previous floods?

However, John Bownas, acting as promoter and advocate of businesses in the town centre as manager of Love Hastings Ltd, is far from happy to accept that the flood tide should be ascribed to a freak of nature. If the system was working as designed, which is what Southern Water seem to be contending, why have there been other more minor floods in the area in recent years? “The big question is – what was different about that Monday from similar weather patterns?” he asks.

Property insurance companies seem to have already rated Hastings town centre as an area of high flood risk and have either refused cover or offered it at such prohibitive premiums or large excesses that few (if any) businesses will have any aid from that quarter. It could be that this rating arises from the proximity of the sea rather than from the threat of surface water or river overflow. Mr Bownas suggests that’s something to investigate.

In any event, virtually every business in Priory Meadow was affected, with Primark’s ground floor left wholly under water, and HMV, Hastings Furniture Service and Subway among those suffering major loss and damage. Marks & Spencer were able to reopen on the following day; many others lost trade all week. The only retail shop that, as of the start of this week, has announced permanent closure in the aftermath is Handsome Bicycles in Harold Place (see Low, Wet and Handsome No Longer). Mr Bownas says he is hoping all others will “pull through”. But, as he added: “If you’re independent, you’ve got a heavy load to bear.”

South Terrace, to the east of Priory Meadow, is the lowest-lying street in the town centre and, not for the first time, suffered the deepest water accumulation, one car in the street being virtually submerged. The Quaker Meeting House at no. 5 has had to be abandoned for the time being, last Sunday’s meeting being rearranged to take place at the Salvation Army premises in St Andrew’s Square, which escaped damage.

A number of recent studies – undertaken by government as well as by cycling or pedestrian pressure groups – have shown that cycling and walking are not only good for your health and general air quality, they also have significant potential economic and social benefits.

According to a University of Birmingham study commissioned by the Department for Transport in 2016, high density, cycle-friendly urban design tends to reduce infrastructure maintenance costs, while cycle parking allows five times more retail spend than the same space for car parking. In other words, it’s much cheaper and more efficient to accommodate cycle parks in shopping streets rather than car parking – and, if that’s done, more people will come, and they’ll shop more.

Another study by Living Streets, updated in 2018, found that, for a large number of towns and cities, when more space is given for walking and cycling and less to cars, the absence of customers arriving by car is more than compensated by people arriving on foot or by bike. 

The trouble is that, in the short term, dominated by Covid-19 concerns, people may see their own cars as safe space, and public areas around as potential pools of risk. The traders in Rye and Bexhill who have objected to reduction of on-street parking places outside their shops (see main story) may just know their own customers best.

• By 2020, increase activity while reducing the number of cyclists killed or seriously injured on England’s roads;
• By 2025, double cycling activity;
• By 2040, make cycling and walking the natural choices for short journeys or as part of a longer journey.

Hastings cyclists demand safe routes, November 2016
PICTURE: T-Polain

Three months previously the Department for Transport had unveiled a £64m Sustainable Travel Access Fund to support local projects over three years from 2017 to 2020 “to boost walking and cycling”. And East Sussex County Council (ESCC) made a successful bid for £1.2m of this investment into a programme it called “Active Access for Growth”.

An ESCC press release issued in May 2018 declared that “three officers and five delivery partners would be available to help East Sussex residents in our focus areas [which includes Hastings and Bexhill] to explore how walking, cycling or public transport can help you go places. There will be a particular focus on targeting those that are currently inactive, that are struggling to access work opportunities, with the aim to broaden employment and training horizons and support greater access to educational opportunities”.

The programme of cycling activities offered over this period included:

• Active Steps: a 10-week cycling course
• Cycle/Electric Cycle Loan Schemes
• School cycle activities and challenges

February 2020: New money

Earlier this month the council reported that it had been awarded another tranche of £400,000 government money to extend the programme to March 2021. Lead member for its transport and environment Claire Dowling said that the new money would cover, among other initiatives, cycle hire, bike maintenance courses and “mindfulness walking sessions”. 

A few days later, Cycling and Walking Minister Chris Heaton-Harris pledged that further government money is to be made available for “every child in England to be offered cycle training” – an additional 400,000 places each year nationally – boasting that they will learn the “core skills to cycle safely and confidently on the road”.

The prime discouragement to cyclists is the sharing of space with cars and commercial vehicles on traffic-choked urban streets and dangerous rural roads

“Cycling is a fun and enjoyable way for children to get to school, the shops or see their friends’, he intoned. “It is also environmentally friendly and has a positive impact on their mental and physical health”.

But, according to figures issued by the Department for Transport, more than 80% of children in England aged between eight and ten-years-old already own a bike; and, since its launch in 2006, more than three million children are said to have taken part in the national Bikeability training scheme.

Why no increase in activity?

So why, despite all this investment in training and ministerial encouragement, are numbers of active cyclists not increasing? Perhaps the funding is fundamentally misdirected.

Every survey within the last two decades or longer has concluded that the prime discouragement to cyclists is the sharing of space with cars and commercial vehicles on traffic-choked urban streets and dangerous rural roads.  

That is certainly so in East Sussex, according to Ian Sier of Hastings Urban Bikes. “Until safe and usually off-road cycle routes are in place”, he says, “promotion schemes will have little effect on creating a significant increase in the take-up of cycling as a form of active travel”.

“Inadequate” segregation

Boris Johnson’s government announced on 11th February further investment to create just 250 miles of segregated cycle routes nationally. That is “a wholly inadequate response”, in Mr Sier’s view.

And, despite all the initiatives put forward by government, figures put forward by Cycle East Sussex show that overall government spending on active travel, if you include infrastructure projects, has actually been reducing rather than increasing. Funding went down from £2.16 per person in 2016/2017 to just 37p per person in 2020/2021, they have calculated. That level of public expenditure on cycle infrastructure compares to £35 per person spent on cycling in Copenhagen, where the Danish government has been investing in a network of segregated cycle routes since 2004 and, as a result, 62% of all its citizens commute to work, school or university by bicycle.

Read more: Back Pedallers

The walking and cycling game that encourages schools, businesses and community groups to spur each other on and compete to get more active in their community – is back in East Sussex and bigger than ever!

Running from 6 June to 25 July, Beat the Street will see towns and villages in East Sussex turned into a massive game where players can earn points and prizes for themselves and their team by exploring their area on foot or by bicycle.

During this free, fun challenge close to 500 sensors called Beat Boxes will appear on lampposts across East Sussex. Players can pick up a Beat the Street card and map at their local library, leisure centre or selected pharmacies and start to play the game by swiping as many Beat Boxes as possible to earn points and win prizes.

Last year, more than 42,000 people from across East Sussex walked, ran and cycled an incredible 230,000 miles in seven weeks – the distance between the Earth and the Moon. This year the organisers behind Beat the Street are promising that the game will be even bigger and better, with proceedings coming to new areas including Pevensey, Robertsbridge, Ticehurst, and Ringmer. New touring Beat Boxes will also be used in village challenges on selected weekends.

Beat the Street is funded by NHS Hastings and Rother CCG, NHS Eastbourne, Hailsham and Seaford CCG and East Sussex Public Health. The initiative forms part of a comprehensive programme of activity to improve health through the Personal and Community Resilience workstream of East Sussex Better Together; it is also part of Connecting 4 You in the west of the county.

Dr David Warden, chair of NHS Hastings and Rother CCG, said: “The team behind Beat the Street have continued to work with local schools, communities and businesses across East Sussex over this last year, promoting the benefits of keeping active. With the expanded game we hope to be able to reach even more people over the next year.”

• To find out more about Beat the Street – visit beatthestreet.me/eastsussex Alternatively, contact team.eastsussex@beatthestreet.me for more information and to enter a team for this year’s competition.

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