John Roland Grimshaw

Vice Chancellor,

I have the honour to present to you John Grimshaw.

John Grimshaw had a very conventional initial career. Born in Guildford, he grew up in Nairobi, where his father held a post with the Church Missionary Society, before the family returned to Monkton Coombe near Bath. He then attended Cambridge University, reading Engineering and Architecture before joining Taylor Woodrow for three years working on projects as varied as Liverpool Cathedral, the Heathrow Cargo Tunnel and the Barbican Centre. In 1969 he spent a year with VSO in Uganda then returned to Bristol and MRM Consultants where he worked on a variety of projects ranging from Winscar reservoir to a multi-storey carpark.

This conventional career was transformed on 7^th July 1977 when a group of Bristol environmentalists, driven by a desire to do something about the dangers to the environment, recently highlighted by the oil crisis, set up a cycling group known as Cyclebag. Within two years the group started a programme of building cycle routes, starting with the five miles of disused railway line between Bristol and Bath. The work was begun by enthusiastic volunteers, with John Grimshaw as Honorary Engineer. From this grew Sustrans (Sustainable Transport) and ultimately the National Cycle Network, with ten thousand miles planned and over six thousand already built. Progress was inevitably slow to begin with, based on volunteers, summer camps and increasingly on Manpower Services Commission Projects. At one stage in the early 1980’s Sustrans was in the extraordinary position of having one paid member of staff, Grimshaw, and some 800 employees on various employment schemes.

Glasgow was one of the early beneficiaries of this activity. One of the earliest routes runs from Bell’s Bridge to Balloch. He claims that one of his greatest achievements was moving one of the fairways at Pollock Park golf course to allow the network to move south. And now much of the network is complete, running from Land’s End to John O’Groats, from the Giant’s Causeway to Harwich

The National Cycle Network is a quite extraordinary concept as well as a brilliant technical achievement. It is the largest transport programme since the motorways were planned; it encompasses probably the biggest programme of public art for a century, with over a thousand sculptures and works of art scattered around the network. It owns over 500 miles of the network and has built some four hundred bridges big and small, many of them a tribute to modern architecture. Sustrans received the second largest lottery grant after the Dome – around which Route 1 of the National Cycle Network gently passes – but the £43.5 million received represents only some 20% of the cost. Sustrans has some 40,000 supporters and works currently on some 2000 projects with a myriad of public agencies, with over 100 employees of its own. As part of the programme, one thousand rather exotic milestones have been set up, which I suspect in years to come will become as collectable as Munros. Sustrans also spins off new projects, of which the “Safe Routes to Schools” is arguably the most important. Over four times as many 7-11 year olds were driven to school in 1990 as in 1971, and one of the major reasons for this increase is road traffic accidents and the fear of them. Sustrans sees reintroducing cycling as important for the well-being of the nation.

Now you might think of all of this as being the well meaning works of the middle class at play. Far from it. When I visited Sustrans last month in the former cork warehouse in Bristol where they are based, I discovered not just a large and sophisticated operation but a wonderful, self-designed computing system. It uses the latest GIS technology to plot everything from constituency boundaries to the location of its 40,000 supporters. But most importantly of all it maps all of the indices of social deprivation against ward boundaries. There is a firm plan to make sure that cyclepaths and cycling reach the most deprived areas of the country as well as the affluent.

As Director and Chief Engineer of Sustrans it is John Grimshaw’s vision which drives all of this forward. And it’s not just about cycling or engineering. Although he freely admits that he loves tough projects and tough negotiations over land, although he claims that it is being utterly pragmatic which has turned this small local self-help project into a grand national plan, his main concern is recovering and humanising public open space, as reflected in the great flowering of public art around the paths. He is as concerned to encourage walking and general fitness as cycling and much of the path and bridge building is still done by hand and by volunteers.

He is a very private man and his work is clearly a consuming passion. It was only with the greatest reluctance that he would admit to spending a little time in sculpture and cabinet-making. However he does have one hobby which he pursues with very public enthusiasm – collecting railway viaducts. Not for him the visit with camera or sketch book, like Charles Remington who liked the company so much he bought it, Grimshaw has been able to buy over fifty viaducts for Sustrans,

But there is one last twist to this tale. Fifteen years ago in European Environment Year, John Grimshaw announced an even more ambitious plan at a conference in Edinburgh. He foresaw a European network of cycle paths that would link the cradle of western civilisation, Athens in Greece to Edinburgh, the self-styled Athens of the North, which would link Moscow in Russia with Moscow in Ayrshire. The plan aims to link every European country with a network of 60,000 kilometres. Those of you smiling at this notion will be pleased to learn that the first sections have already opened and works are in progress in areas as varied as Gdansk and Bilbao. If the Epistle to the Corinthians reminds us that it is faith that moves mountains, he is eloquent testimony to the fact that an engineer with a vision can build paths through them. In honouring John Grimshaw, then, we are recognising the power of the individual to effect change for the benefit of all.

It is with great pleasure, therefore, Vice-Chancellor, that, with the authority of Senate, I ask you to confer upon John Roland Grimshaw the degree of Doctor of the University honoris causa.