Take the renewal of the Haweswater Aqueduct. Built in the 1950s, it runs for roughly 110 kilometres from the Lake District to Manchester, supplying water to millions of people. Much of it now needs replacing. The programme to do so is vast—multi-decade, technically complex, and costing on the order of £3 billion.

This is not a surface project in the way canals or roads once were. Much of the work is underground tunnelling, with shafts, access compounds and temporary surface disruption that will later be reinstated. And that reinstatement is where the story usually ends: fields returned to agriculture, hedges replanted, scars smoothed away, the landscape made to look as though nothing had happened.

But from a strategic perspective, something extraordinary has just occurred. A continuous corridor—carefully surveyed, negotiated with landowners, engineered, accessed, and managed—has been created across uplands, valleys, farmland and towns. The line already exists. The question is simply whether we choose to forget it, or to build on it.

A low-gradient greenway following even part of that route would be transformational: a continuous, traffic-free path linking rural Lancashire to the edge of the Lake District; a spine connecting villages, farms, rail stations, existing footpaths and canal towpaths; a linear habitat corridor rather than another isolated fragment of access land.

The additional cost to do this—surfacing a parallel path, planting, signage, access control—would be measured in tens of millions, not billions. In round terms, well under 1% of the cost of the aqueduct renewal itself.

That does not make it “cheap”. It makes it strategically trivial.

New water systems, old mistakes

The same logic applies to new reservoirs and their associated aqueducts. Climate change and population pressures mean that new water storage is being planned and built across England. Reservoirs do not exist in isolation: they require long conveyance routes, pumping stations, buffer land, and protected corridors to safeguard water quality.

Historically, these corridors are treated defensively. Public access is excluded where possible. Land is restored to a narrow, functional definition of “original use”. Recreation, ecology and mobility are considered secondary—if they are considered at all.

Yet reservoirs already reshape landscapes on a grand scale. They create new shorelines, new views, new ecological niches. The idea that the connecting infrastructure must be invisible, inaccessible and socially inert is not an engineering necessity; it is a failure of imagination.

Designing greenways alongside new aqueducts from the outset would cost far less than retrofitting them later. The land is already constrained, negotiated, and protected. The work is already happening. What is missing is not feasibility, but intent.

The electricity grid as a hidden greenway network

Now consider electricity. The UK is in the middle of the largest grid expansion since the post-war period. Offshore wind, interconnectors and decarbonisation are driving new high-voltage routes across the country. Much of this infrastructure is underground, particularly where public opposition to pylons is strong.

Under programmes such as the Great Grid Upgrade, hundreds of kilometres of trenches are being dug, cables laid, and land reinstated. These corridors are typically narrow—often just a few metres wide—but they run for extraordinary distances: from the Lincolnshire coast toward the south; from the Fylde coast inland toward Preston; from rural substations toward cities.

Once again, the default assumption is that land should be put back exactly as it was. Fields returned. Grass reseeded. Public access discouraged.

But from a national perspective, these cable routes form something else entirely: a latent network of linear space, already cleared, already managed, already constrained from development. With modest widening in selected sections, careful planting, and thoughtful design, they could become part of a dispersed countryside greenway system—quiet routes linking places that currently require a car, or force walkers and cyclists onto fast rural roads.

Against a grid investment measured in tens of billions, the additional cost of greenway infrastructure would be fractions of a percent. Lost in rounding errors. Invisible in balance sheets. Profound in lived experience.

This is not about “value for money”

At this point, the instinct is always the same: ask for a business case. Quantify the benefits. Monetise health outcomes. Assign a tourism multiplier. Compare pounds spent to pounds returned.

That instinct is understandable—and beside the point.

This is not an argument that any single aqueduct or cable route must include a greenway. It is an argument that opportunities are constantly arising, embedded within projects we already accept as necessary and unavoidable. Water must flow. Power must move. Land must be disturbed and restored.

The real question is whether we have the strategic maturity to notice these moments and say: while we are here, while the ground is already open, while the corridor already exists, what else could this line through the landscape do for us?

Past generations did this instinctively. Canals carried boats, but they also created towpaths, linear habitats, and new ways of moving through the countryside. Railways reshaped towns, economies and leisure. Even motorways, for all their damage, were conceived as part of a national system, not as isolated projects.

What we lack today is not money, technology or capability. It is permission to think in systems, and the confidence to pursue long, cumulative benefits rather than isolated wins.

A quiet, generational choice

If countryside greenways ever emerge at scale, it will not be because one perfect scheme proved itself beyond doubt. It will be because a pattern was recognised: that the country is already being threaded with lines of infrastructure, and that each line is a chance—small on its own, enormous in aggregate—to add beauty, access, ecology and calm back into everyday life.

The opportunity is there. Repeatedly. Quietly. All the time.

What is missing is the vision to see it.

This arrangement is not accidental. Modern societies are organised around the assumption that most waking hours must be given over to paid work, and that fulfilment will be found either in consumption or in escape from that work. Meaning is postponed. Movement has been optimised out of daily life and reintroduced as exercise. Social contact is compressed into evenings and weekends, then increasingly mediated by screens. Even pleasure becomes transactional, booked in advance and consumed at speed. We have built a world in which ordinary time is stripped of richness, and then we wonder why so many people feel restless, burnt out, or quietly dissatisfied even when their lives appear successful.

For most of human history, life was not so sharply divided. Work was often hard and constrained by necessity, but it was slower, embedded in daily rhythms and closely connected to tangible outcomes: food grown, objects made or repaired, people cared for. Movement was unavoidable. Social contact was incidental rather than scheduled. A good life was not something you escaped to; it was something imperfectly woven into everyday existence.

The availability of time also changes what we value. Much of modern consumption compensates for the absence of high-quality shared space close to where we live. We buy larger homes because public space is poor, rely on cars because streets are hostile, and pay for entertainment because there are few places to simply exist together without spending money. As a result, many of the things we associate with a good life—nature, beauty, calm, novelty, social connection—have been pushed far away. We are required to drive or fly to reach them, and then to compress our enjoyment into short, intense bursts. In the process, we have quietly convinced ourselves that we enjoy the means of access: that traffic, long drives, airports, queues, and delays are somehow part of the pleasure. But they are not. They are the cost of a system in which everyday environments are too impoverished to support a good life on their own. Greenways offer a different logic. By threading continuous, car-free routes through towns, cities, and countryside, they bring many of the ingredients of a good life—movement, nature, encounter, and time—back within daily reach, reducing the need to travel far in order to feel alive. When these Greenways are complemented by cafés, restaurants, bakeries, and simple picnic places, they become not just routes through space, they further enrich everyday life.

This is where the post-AI moment matters. Artificial intelligence is not just another productivity tool; it is a force that steadily compresses human labour. Tasks that once took days now take hours. Entire categories of cognitive and administrative work are being automated or radically accelerated. This process will be uneven and politically contested, but its direction is clear. Large numbers of people will be required to work fewer hours, whether we plan for that or not.

This matters because without a compelling alternative vision of how life might be lived, nothing will change. Reduced working hours alone do not create a better life; they merely create empty space. If that space is filled with more consumption, more travel, and more digital distraction, we will have missed a rare opportunity. The post-AI transition provides not only the motivation to rethink the structure of everyday life, but also the material resources—time, productivity, shared wealth—to do so deliberately rather than by accident.

One obvious change concerns the pace at which we move through the world. When time is scarce, speed becomes a moral value. Driving replaces walking, efficiency replaces presence, and routes are chosen for pace rather than pleasure. If work compresses, slowness can re-enter daily life without guilt. Walking becomes practical again. Longer routes make sense. Stopping is no longer a failure of productivity.

This is where physical infrastructure matters. Greenways—continuous, beautiful, car-free corridors for walking and cycling—are not just transport projects. They slow us down, invite attention, and make movement itself enriching rather than merely functional. They allow people to pass through landscapes, neighbourhoods, and shared spaces in a way that supports reflection, chance encounters, and a sense of continuity. In a post-AI world, where experience rather than speed becomes the primary objective, such infrastructure becomes central rather than supplemental.

The availability of time also changes what we value. Much of modern consumption compensates for the absence of high-quality shared space. We buy larger homes because public space is poor. We rely on cars because public transport is unreliable or feels hostile. We pay for entertainment because there are few places to simply exist together without spending money. With more time, the value of public luxury rises: well-designed paths, parks, workshops, libraries, swimming places, gardens, and cafés that function as social infrastructure rather than commercial destinations. These spaces work best when people are not rushing through them, but returning regularly, becoming familiar with them, and gradually taking responsibility for them.

Greenways play a second role here, not just as routes but as threads that stitch these forms of public luxury into everyday life. They allow periods of enriching time—movement, nature, conversation, quiet—to be woven into ordinary days rather than reserved for special trips. A walk to the shops becomes a moment of restoration. A cycle to help a friend becomes a social encounter. Life gets richer without effort.

Concerns are often raised that if work shrinks, people will lose purpose. But this fear confuses paid employment with usefulness. Much of what sustains society—care, maintenance, teaching, stewardship, mutual aid—already exists in the margins of working life, squeezed into evenings and weekends or carried disproportionately by retirees. When time is abundant, contribution no longer feels like an extra burden. Volunteering becomes normal rather than heroic. People help because they have the opportunity, not because they are exceptional.

A slower, less work-dominated life also creates space for creation rather than constant consumption. Modern life leaves little room for making things badly, slowly, or without an audience. Yet growing food, repairing objects, painting, writing, building, and cooking are deeply linked to satisfaction and agency. These activities require time that is not tightly managed and a tolerance for imperfection. The post-AI world, if shaped intentionally, could normalise creation as part of everyday life rather than an aspirational hobby.

Perhaps most importantly, a rebalanced life restores small, frequent social contact. Much of what we describe as loneliness is not the absence of close relationships, but the loss of low-stakes familiarity: the nods, the brief conversations, the repeated encounters that quietly anchor us to place. These do not flourish in a culture of rushing, driving, and scheduling. They emerge when people move slowly and regularly, through shared spaces and encounter one another without a specific purpose.

Artificial intelligence will not, by itself, deliver a good life. Left unattended, it could just as easily intensify existing patterns of isolation and overconsumption. But it does something unprecedented: it loosens the grip of a work structure that was never designed for human flourishing, only for output. That creates a narrow but real window in which to rethink how life is organised.

A good life is not dramatic or indulgent. It does not require constant novelty or escape. It requires continuity—a steady weaving of meaning, movement, usefulness, and connection into ordinary days. The post-AI moment gives us both the reason and the means to attempt that weaving again.

A good life is not somewhere else. It is something shaped, quietly and repeatedly, in the way we move through the world every day.

If you’d like to read more about how we build consensus around a project like this, then this is a good essay to read next:

If you’re daunted by the cost or ambition required then read this one too:

Greenways begin from a refusal of that idea.

They are not designed as amenities, or as concessions to leisure, or as thin green lines drawn where nothing better could be agreed. They are designed as a new kind of infrastructure, a new way to move through the world, optimised to help people thrive, rather than to just move vehicles. That difference is not conceptual; it is visceral. You feel it the moment you step onto one.

The first thing you notice is the width. Not symbolic width, not “wide for a path”, but actual space. Space to walk without hugging the verge. Space to cycle without threading between pedestrians. Space that feels intentional rather than apologetic. It’s not just space to move on, it’s a space to experience, rich, biodiverse planting on each side, trees, bushes, wild flowers.

This width is not just decorative. It is what allows Greenways to work in the long term. A corridor that is six, eight, sometimes ten metres wide can be built, resurfaced, drained, and replanted using ordinary farm-scale and construction-industry scale equipment. Tractors, diggers, mowers, service vehicles, everything needed to keep the greenway alive can reach it easily. Nothing about it is fragile. Nothing relies on permanent novelty or specialist equipment, or too much human labour.

That practical generosity of space has a psychological effect too. Wide places calm people down. They remove the low-level tension that comes from constantly negotiating who should yield, who is in the way, who is moving too fast. On a Greenway, you don’t feel hurried. You don’t feel threatened. You simply move.

The second thing you notice is that you are not sharing a single compromised surface. Greenways are built with two clear tracks running alongside one another. One is optimised for cycling: smooth, continuous, forgiving, suitable for everyday bikes, cargo bikes, e-bikes, adaptive cycles, mobility scooters. The other is for walking and rolling: comfortable underfoot, welcoming to wheelchairs and prams near towns, gradually becoming more natural and lower cost construction as you move further from the urban edge.

This separation removes a quiet but pervasive source of friction from everyday movement. There is no need for constant negotiation, bell ringing, or apology. Everyone knows where they belong, and no one is treated as an inconvenience.

What makes this work is that Greenways are not built to impress at launch. They are built to improve over time. Their design is intentionally modest: robust surfaces, simple geometry, clear drainage, planting that can be maintained without ceremony. Where technology is used, it is used quietly — drones inspecting surfaces and tree health, digital maps showing gradients and accessibility, lightweight e-service vehicles delivering materials for routine maintenance.

The ambition is not spectacle. It’s to rely of nature to take care of creating beauty over time and humans to design in convenience, practicality and maintainability from the start.

A Greenway should still be quietly doing its job in fifty years’ time, without anyone needing to explain why it matters, greenways just become a natural part of the way that humans move through the world.

I’m glossing over a lot of practicalities at this stage, construction technology and cost, maintenance, turning points for maintenance vehicles, how cyclists cross over the centre planting etc, how we keep cyclists and pedestrians in their ‘lanes’. All that is coming, once we get the concept well defined.

If you’d like to read more about the practicalities of building greenways, then this essay is a good place to go next:

We walk on roads we did not plan, drink water from systems we did not design, flush waste into sewers we rarely think about, and move electricity through grids whose origins predate most of us. These systems are so embedded in daily life that they feel almost natural, as if they simply exist rather than having been imagined, financed, argued over, and constructed by people who assumed the future mattered.

The canal network, the railways, the road system, the sewage infrastructure, the gas and electricity grids, reservoirs and dams, ports, bridges, and eventually the motorway network were not marginal upgrades. They were civilisational projects. They required vision, ambition, and a willingness to commit resources over timescales far longer than a single government, a single budget, or even a single generation.

What is striking is not just what was built, but when and how it was built. Much of this infrastructure was conceived at a time when the country was far poorer than it is today. GDP per capita was a fraction of modern levels and total GDP even more so. Mechanisation was limited. Communication was slow. Project management was rudimentary. Materials science was primitive by contemporary standards. Enormous systems were constructed with hand tools, muscle power, and organisational methods that now look astonishingly crude.

And yet they were built.

They were built because the people behind them believed that infrastructure was not just about efficiency or growth, but about enabling human life to function better. Clean water was a public health intervention. Railways were a social and economic integrator. Electricity was not merely a convenience, but a foundation for entirely new forms of work and living. These systems reduced friction across society. They took pressure off other systems before the language of “systems thinking” even existed.

Today, when we talk about major infrastructure, the picture has narrowed dramatically. The most visible large-scale projects being built are data centres, logistics hubs, distribution warehouses, and digital backbones. These are not useless, but they are telling. They are infrastructure designed primarily to optimise capital flows, data processing, and abstract productivity, rather than to reshape daily life in ways that allow people to thrive.

A data centre does not give people purpose. It does not reconnect people to land, movement, or community. It does not lower welfare dependency or stabilise struggling rural economies. It does not repair ecological fragmentation or create shared civic space. It improves the digital layer of an already stressed physical world, while leaving the underlying pressures intact.

This is not a technological failure. It is a failure of ambition and time horizon.

We often tell ourselves that large, joined-up infrastructure is no longer possible: that planning is too complex, public finances too constrained, politics too fragmented, and risk too hard to manage. But this explanation collapses under scrutiny. We are vastly richer than the societies that built the systems we still depend on. We have incomparably better tools, better materials, better modelling, better coordination, and instant communication. The constraint is not capability. It is will.

We have become adept at managing problems in isolation. Transport is handled separately from health, which is handled separately from farming, which is handled separately from welfare, ecology, and employment. Each system is optimised locally, often defensively, and almost always expensively. What we have lost is the confidence to ask a different question: what single piece of infrastructure could relieve pressure across multiple systems at once?

Historically, that is exactly what great infrastructure did. Sewers reduced disease and medical demand. Railways reshaped labour markets and housing patterns. Electrification increased productivity while improving domestic life. These projects did not merely solve the problem they were nominally built for; they restructured society in ways that made other problems smaller.

We are now living through a convergence of pressures that demands that kind of thinking again. Roads and railways are congested. Health services are overstretched. Physical inactivity and loneliness are endemic. Farming is under financial and ecological strain. Welfare costs are rising. Communities feel hollowed out. At the same time, automation and AI are beginning to disrupt work itself, threatening not just employment but meaning, structure, and purpose.

The instinctive response is to treat each of these as a separate crisis, managed through incremental policy tweaks and short-term funding. But this is precisely the moment that calls for infrastructure of the old kind: physical, visible, shared systems that quietly make life easier in many directions at once.

The irony is that such infrastructure would be cheap by historical standards. Compared to motorways, high-speed rail, or national energy grids, a new generation of human-scale, multifunctional infrastructure would cost a tiny fraction of what we once spent as a matter of course. Yet the returns would be broad and compounding: fewer car journeys, less pressure on transport networks, better population health, lower healthcare demand, stronger local economies, more resilient farming, restored habitats, and renewed civic pride.

The benefits would not appear neatly in quarterly balance sheets. They would show up as absence: fewer problems downstream, fewer crises requiring emergency intervention, fewer people falling through gaps. That is how infrastructure is supposed to work. Its success is measured by what no longer breaks.

The societies that built our canals, railways, and sewers were not uniquely enlightened. They were simply willing to think beyond immediate return, beyond departmental silos, and beyond the assumption that the future could look after itself.

We have not lost the ability to build. We have lost the nerve to commit.

Recovering that nerve — the willingness to invest in shared systems that improve everyday life in obvious, physical, and enduring ways — may be one of the most important choices facing modern societies. Not because it is nostalgic, but because it is rational.

Infrastructure is how a society decides what kind of future it is willing to make real.

At the moment, the future we are choosing is small.

It does not have to be.

If you want more on the need for more vision, strategy and ambition in the UK, then this essay is for you:

The disagreements begin not with these aims, but with the systems used to pursue them. We have allowed ourselves to believe that growth and care, efficiency and beauty, prosperity and stewardship must sit in opposition. As a result, ambition has been squeezed into ever smaller, more defensive forms. When we do attempt something bold, it is usually highly localised, bespoke, and expensive: a single flagship building, a short stretch of premium infrastructure, a symbolic intervention concentrated in one place and burdened with enormous expectations. These projects attract controversy not because ambition is wrong, but because it has been forced into forms that are brittle, politically fragile, and hard to replicate.

This is a sharp break from the way earlier generations thought about national progress. The infrastructure that reshaped everyday life in this country was rarely conceived as spectacle. Canals, railways, parks, and public institutions were networks rather than monuments. They used well-understood technologies. They repeated simple patterns. They scaled horizontally, improving life incrementally across many places rather than dramatically in a few. Their power lay not in any single element, but in the way they quietly connected everything else together.

Greenways belong to that older tradition of ambition. They propose a national project without grandstanding, one that relies not on novel engineering or heroic design, but on patience, repetition, and cumulative effect. They use familiar materials and techniques. They work with landscapes rather than against them. They let nature do much of the hard work: managing water through soil, creating beauty through planting, building resilience through ecological succession rather than constant intervention.

This matters because it changes the political and cultural dynamics entirely. Greenways do not ask people to choose between prosperity and care, or between freedom and responsibility. They create the conditions for all of these things at once. They enable economic activity by increasing footfall, dwell time, and the attractiveness of places, rather than simply accelerating movement through them. They support health not by exhortation or regulation, but by making the healthy choice the easy and enjoyable one. They reduce pressure on roads, public services, and healthcare by removing friction upstream rather than managing crises downstream.

At the same time, they restore access to nature in a way that feels integrated rather than precious. They treat land as productive, lived-in, and shared, not as something fenced off or curated at a distance. They improve biodiversity without excluding people, and they improve mobility without demanding car ownership or constant consumption. You do not need permission, qualification, or subscription to use a Greenway. You simply step onto it and move through the world a little more easily.

This combination is rare, and it is why Greenways offer such strong common ground. They reward enterprise without hollowing out place. They encourage stewardship without imposing ideology. They create shared benefit without heavy-handed control. They produce obvious winners without creating obvious losers, which is the quiet precondition for any project that hopes to endure.

Just as importantly, they fit the realities of how trust now works. Greenways do not require everything to go right all at once. They can be built section by section, adapted to local conditions, paused and resumed without collapsing the entire vision. They improve life as they grow rather than only when they are complete. In a low-trust, low-patience environment, this kind of resilience matters more than rhetorical brilliance.

Perhaps the most powerful effect of Greenways is psychological. They restore something that has been quietly eroded: the sense that public systems can work in our favour rather than merely manage decline. They remind people what it feels like when movement is pleasant, when public space is generous, when everyday environments support rather than exhaust. Once people experience that, many of the old arguments lose their force. Thriving stops sounding abstract or ideological. It becomes practical, ordinary, and hard to argue against.

In that sense, Greenways are not just infrastructure. They are a way of rebuilding confidence without confrontation, ambition without spectacle, and national purpose without division. They offer a reminder that we do not have to choose between competing visions of a good society, because most of us were aiming for the same thing all along.

The real question, once that is remembered, is no longer who this is for or what it represents. It becomes something much simpler, and much harder to dismiss.

Why wouldn’t we build more of this?

If at this point you think there’s common ground between right, left and centre about the need to thrive, but we lack the ambition, then I wrote this essay just for you:

This essay isn’t about perfect solutions. It’s about showing that we understand the problems, and that nothing here is naïve, fragile, or unaffordable at scale.

Build it like rural infrastructure, not a park path

A countryside Greenway is not a leisure trail dropped into farmland. It’s a narrow, low-speed rural corridor designed to be maintained using ordinary agricultural and land-management equipment.

That immediately drives several design decisions:

• The corridor contains two parallel paths — one primarily for cycling, one for walking — but they are sized so that maintenance vehicles can safely use them.

• Between them is a narrow planted strip (around 1–1.5 m), low and mowable, not decorative. This allows tractors and small trucks to straddle the corridor if needed without destroying edges.

• Surfaces, edges, and drainage are designed to tolerate slow, repeated use by compact tractors, rollers, sweepers, arborist vehicles, and small electric service trucks.

The aim is not to exclude vehicles, but to design for slow, light vehicles so the surface lasts and maintenance is straightforward.

Two kinds of “passing places”, for different problems

One of the most common mistakes in path design is assuming that all “passing” problems are the same. They aren’t.

Greenways need two distinct systems:

1. User cross-overs

   Frequent, simple connections between the walking and cycling paths, allowing people to step or roll briefly into the adjacent path to get around a hedge-cutter or sweeper.

   These don’t need heavy construction — they need good sightlines and clear intent.

2. Vehicle passing and turning points

   Less frequent, but more robust. These allow tractors, maintenance vehicles, and service trucks to pass, turn, or pull off without chewing up edges.

   They’re placed at logical nodes: access points, toilet locations, crossings, junctions.

Separating these two ideas keeps the corridor calm for users and practical for maintenance.

Surfaces: perfection near towns, realism in the countryside

Guidance bodies quite rightly emphasise smooth, bound surfaces — especially where routes function as everyday transport, or where accessibility needs are highest.

But real-world cycling culture already shows that perfection is not required everywhere.

Some of the UK’s most loved and heavily used routes — including long rural railway paths and many canal and river corridors — are unbound, compacted, or even muddy in places. People still use them in huge numbers. And crucially, compacted limestone, chalk, or similar surfaces are vastly better than mud, even if they don’t meet the ideal urban standard.

So the Greenway network should be explicit about a tiered approach:

• Near towns, villages, and on the first mile or two of each route, surfaces should be smooth, bound, and accessible — good enough for wheelchairs, mobility scooters, cargo bikes, and year-round use.

• Further out, where speeds are lower and use is more recreational or mixed, engineered unbound surfaces are entirely appropriate: compacted, well-drained, smooth enough to cycle on comfortably, but not designed for speed.

• Existing towpaths and river paths don’t need perfection — they need to be upgraded out of the mud.

This isn’t about lowering ambition. It’s about matching engineering to use, and avoiding unnecessary cost.

Mud happens — so design for it

Where Greenways cross working farmland, mud is inevitable. The mistake is pretending it isn’t.

The solution isn’t signage or enforcement; it’s design:

• Hardstanding aprons at field crossings so tyres shed soil before reaching the paths.

• Drainage that pulls water away from crossing points.

• Short, durable “sacrificial” sections that can be brushed or scraped clean quickly.

Handled properly, mud becomes a routine maintenance issue, not a reason for conflict.

Maintenance as a local rural economy

A key strength of this approach is that maintenance can be contracted locally:

• Farmers trimming hedges.

• Arborists managing trees.

• Contractors mowing edges and planted strips.

• Small electric utility vehicles servicing composting toilets and bins.

Nothing here requires specialist kit or exotic expertise. The corridor is designed so that normal rural skills and machinery are an asset, not a liability.

Costs — and why they’re manageable

If you look at published figures for high-spec urban cycle routes, the numbers can sound alarming: often £1–2 million per mile. Those figures usually include urban complexity, utilities, traffic management, and bespoke design — all things that dominate cost near towns.

But countryside Greenways are different. They benefit enormously from:

• standardised designs,

• repeatable construction,

• long continuous runs,

• and simple land agreements.

Rather than pretending there’s one magic number, it’s more honest to frame this as a 20-year national programme with mixed standards:

• High-spec urban connectors where they matter most.

• Cheaper, robust rural construction elsewhere.

• Continuous improvement rather than one-off perfection.

Even at £500,000 per mile on average — which allows for a mix of urban and rural sections — a 10,000-mile national network would cost around £5 billion spread over 20 years.

That’s £250 million per year.

To put that in context:

• HS2 is a £100 billion-scale project.

• The UK spends tens of billions every year on road maintenance and expansion.

• The NHS budget is over £180 billion per year.

• UK residents spend many tens of billions annually on flights and overseas travel.

• £250 million a year is roughly £4 per person per year.

For infrastructure that improves health, reduces transport costs, strengthens rural economies, supports biodiversity, and reshapes how people use land and time, that’s not extravagant. It’s modest.

The core point

Greenways don’t need to be perfect everywhere to be transformative.

They need to be:

• practical,

• maintainable,

• honest about trade-offs,

• and built at a scale where small design compromises unlock huge social value.

This isn’t about building a countryside museum. It’s about creating a working national system — one that accepts tractors, mud, seasons, budgets, and people as they actually are — and still delivers something quietly extraordinary over time.

If at this point it still sounds far too expensive I suggest looping back and reading this essay next:

We have a lot of paths, and a few cycle paths, but they are often barely functional and so far removed from what we need to thrive in an urban environment, that at best they should be thought of as something that might connect to a greenway, rather than become one.

Urban greenways start from a different premise. They are not parks, and they are not cycle lanes. They are continuous, deliberate corridors of green space designed to carry people—on foot, by bike, and at human speed—through the city and out into the wider landscape. When designed correctly they are also the spine from which economic regeneration can flow and an opportunity to add higher density housing, without more car parks or roads.

What makes them special is not any single benefit, but the way they quietly re-order how urban spaces works.

The most obvious function of a greenway is green space itself, but not in the ornamental sense. Linear green space behaves differently from enclosed parks. You don’t have to decide to go there; you pass through it on the way to somewhere else. That changes how often it is used and who it is for. A greenway can calm a commute, soften a school run, or turn a necessary errand into something restorative. Over time, it embeds nature into daily life rather than reserving it for leisure. As people come to value a greenway, they want to live near it and businesses want to capture the passing trade.

This matters because cities don’t just need more green space, they need accessible green structure. A single park can be crowded, avoided, or bypassed. A greenway, by contrast, distributes greenery across neighbourhoods and connects them. It makes the city feel more breathable without hollowing it out.

What is less often recognised is that greenways are also powerful economic infrastructure. Land that sits alongside a high-quality, car-free corridor becomes valuable in a particular way. It is not isolated or exclusive; it is connected, visible, and passed daily by thousands of people. This creates a natural edge condition where small businesses want to be, where cafés work, where workshops, studios, and local services can survive on footfall rather than destination traffic.

The urban form that emerges is familiar because we’ve seen it before along canals. Ground-floor commercial spaces facing the route, with apartments above, create density without hostility. People live over movement rather than traffic, and streets become social rather than merely functional. The greenway itself becomes a shared front garden for the city, a public luxury.

Perhaps the most profound role of an urban greenway, though, is what it does at the city’s edge. Modern cities often feel sealed, as if leaving them requires a car, a train, or an act of planning. Greenways puncture that boundary. They provide a clear, legible route from dense neighbourhoods into open countryside, one that can be followed without maps, tickets, or engines.

It’s surprising when you look at the numbers how many city dwellers can reach the countryside on an eBike, if greenways existed to get them there by a fairly direct and safe route and a route that provides an enriching experience, not a dangerous one down busy city roads. Fewer pedestrians might reach the countryside, but this matters less if the greenway is already a lovely place to spend an afternoon.

That has psychological weight. Knowing you can walk or cycle out of the city under your own power restores a sense of orientation that many people have lost. It turns the countryside from a destination into an extension of everyday life. For children, it means independence. For adults, it changes how weekends, exercise, and even identity are experienced.

This outward connection also works in reverse. Greenways make it possible to commute from villages and edge settlements into towns and cities by bike in a way that feels safe, efficient, and appealing. That reduces pressure on roads not by restricting cars, but by making another option genuinely better. People don’t abandon car journeys because they are told to; they do it when the alternative is calmer, quicker, and more pleasant.

Over time, this enables a different pattern of settlement. People can live slightly further out without being forced into car dependency. Towns can grow without continuously widening roads. The greenway becomes a transport corridor that happens to be green, rather than a green space that happens to allow bikes.

All of this sounds ambitious, but the crucial point is that urban greenways are not built all at once. They begin outside cities, where land is cheaper, resistance lower, and benefits immediately obvious. Initially river and canal side walks would be upgraded to embryonic greenways or new greenways would be created to connect countryside to parks, or housing developments on the edges of towns. For the rest of a town there would be clear access points, car parks, and links to public transport. These first sections or upgrades establish standards and expectations. They show what “good” looks like.

Once in place, they start to pull the city toward them. Every planning decision becomes an opportunity to stitch a little more greenway into the urban fabric. A housing development aligns its internal paths. A regeneration site opens onto the corridor. A redundant strip of land becomes a connection rather than leftover space. Progress is incremental, sometimes frustratingly so, but it is cumulative. Greenways are a generational product, or even a multi-generational one, pursued with vision, strategy and energy, but with the long game in mind.

Eventually, harder decisions arise. In dense areas, there is no spare land waiting politely to be repurposed. Greenways may need to run alongside roads, with traffic made one-way or lanes removed entirely. In some cases, compulsory purchase will be unavoidable. These are not easy choices, but cities have made far more disruptive decisions in favour of cars or out of town retail parks for decades without much hesitation. The difference here is intent: space is being reclaimed for long-term public value rather than short-term throughput.

Over years rather than months, the greenway becomes continuous. Not uniform. Not perfect. But legible and reliable. It becomes part of how people understand their city, just as rivers and canals once were.

Urban greenways matter because they offer a way for cities to grow without becoming harsher, to densify without becoming oppressive, and to reconnect with the countryside without retreating from modern life. They are not decorative projects or lifestyle extras. They are missing infrastructure—quiet, patient, and transformative.

If cities are serious about health, climate resilience, and preventing cities becoming one big traffic jam, greenways are not a nice idea for later. They are something we should have designed in from the start and started building years ago.

The next essay takes a look at some existing urban greenways and what they can teach us:

This instinct would be understandable if it emerged from scarcity. But it doesn’t. Britain today is vastly richer than it was during almost every period in which we undertook our most ambitious projects. We built cathedrals when most people lived at subsistence level. We built railways, canals, museums, galleries, parks, sewage systems, and national institutions when GDP was a fraction of today’s. We built slowly, patiently, across generations, without spreadsheets capable of modelling risk to the third decimal place.

What we seem to have lost is not money, but vision.

When We Believed the Future Was Worth Building

The great public works of the past were not the result of cost–benefit optimisation in the modern sense. They were expressions of collective intent. Cathedrals were built by people who knew they would never see them finished. Railways were driven across landscapes with a confidence that assumed the future would need them. National parks were created not because they maximised short-term returns, but because beauty, access to nature, and shared inheritance were considered fundamental goods.

Crucially, these projects were not framed as luxuries for the elite. They were framed as civilisational statements: this is the kind of society we are building. Museums and galleries were built for the public. Parks were created for ordinary people. Railways connected working towns as much as wealthy cities. There was an implicit belief that the population deserved access to beauty, movement, and possibility.

That belief now feels fragile.

From National Confidence to Localised Spectacle

What passes for ambition today is tellingly different. Our big ideas have become inherently local, bespoke, and expensive. A new national museum. A single high-speed rail line. A garden bridge across the River Thames. A beautified Oxford Street. Each is presented as a once-in-a-generation project, freighted with political risk, symbolic over-investment, and an unspoken fear of failure.

These schemes tend to concentrate vast sums of money into small geographic areas, for the benefit of a fraction of the population, require complex one-off engineering solutions, and become lightning rods for controversy. Because they are unique, they are difficult to replicate. Because they are expensive, they must be justified endlessly. Because they are fragile politically, they are easily abandoned. Even when completed, they rarely change everyday life for most people.

This is a very different model of ambition to the one that built canals, railways, or national parks. Those systems were not singular monuments. They were networks. They used well-understood technologies. They repeated simple patterns across the country. They improved life incrementally, everywhere, rather than dramatically, somewhere.

In other words, they scaled horizontally, not vertically.

The Psychology of Pre-Emptive Decline

Modern Britain suffers from a kind of learned pessimism. We assume complexity will defeat us. We assume cost overruns are inevitable and therefore paralysing. We assume that ambition is hubris, that beauty is optional, and that public space must justify itself in purely financial terms.

This mindset becomes self-fulfilling. When we expect failure, we design timidly. When we design timidly, projects underperform. When projects underperform, we treat this as proof that ambition was the mistake. Over time, the very idea of building something bold begins to feel inappropriate—not for people like us.

Yet this is historically abnormal. High-trust, high-ambition societies do not emerge from wealth alone; they emerge from shared belief. They build because they believe the future will exist, that people will still be there to use what is made, and that patience is a virtue rather than a liability.

Greenways and a Different Model of Ambition

This is what makes Greenways such a powerful idea. Not because they are extravagant, but because they revive a different tradition of ambition.

Greenways do not rely on novel technology or heroic engineering. They use well-understood materials. They work with land rather than against it. They let nature do much of the hard work: drainage through soil, beauty through planting, resilience through ecological succession, maintenance designed in. They are cheap enough to be repeated, flexible enough to adapt to local conditions, and valuable enough to matter everywhere.

Crucially, they scale nationally because they are modest locally. No single Greenway has to justify itself as a masterpiece. Its value comes from being part of a larger whole: a connective tissue that links towns, cities, villages, and countryside into a coherent system of movement, access, and everyday beauty.

This is ambition without spectacle. Confidence without bravado.

A New Way to Move — and to Think

Greenways are not just about transport. They are about restoring a sense of national confidence. They demonstrate that we can still plan long-term, build patiently, and prioritise quality over minimal compliance. They create visible, everyday proof that public investment can improve daily life rather than merely manage decline.

Once such things exist, they change expectations. People begin to ask why other routes are so hostile, why public spaces elsewhere are so mean, why beauty is treated as an optional extra. Ambition becomes normalised again. Standards rise.

This is how cultures shift—not through slogans, but through lived experience.

Learning to Deserve Good Things Again

Perhaps the deepest damage inflicted by decades of lowered ambition is psychological. We have half-convinced ourselves that we do not deserve nice things. That beauty is frivolous. That patience is impractical. That public luxury is somehow morally suspect.

History suggests the opposite. Societies that invest in shared beauty, access, and dignity tend to be more cohesive, more productive, and more resilient. They do not decay because they build; they decay when they stop believing that building is worthwhile.

Greenways will not solve everything. But they could become a visible expression of a renewed frame of mind: one that says we are still capable of imagining a better everyday world—and then quietly, patiently, setting about making it real.

Ambition is not a cost.

It is a prerequisite.

And if we cannot bring ourselves to build something as simple, humane, and quietly transformative as a national network of Greenways, the question is not whether we can afford them.

It is whether we still remember how to think at national scale at all.

If at this point you are thinking, I like the ambition, but it sounds so expensive! Take a look at this essay, the first of many on the construction costs and challenges!

It is easy to fall in love with images of urban greenways. Clean lines, generous planting, cafés spilling onto the path, bicycles gliding past pedestrians in easy coexistence. These images matter — they give shape to ambition — but they also hide the hardest truth about greenways in cities: almost none of this space is empty.

Unlike countryside routes, where a corridor can often be laid across land already open to negotiation, urban space is dense, contested, and saturated with history, ownership, and inertia. Every metre is already doing something. Every building has a story. Every road has a constituency. This makes the idea of carving a continuous, beautiful greenway through a city feel, at best, naive — and at worst, threatening.

This is a very early concept of how to gradually work towards urban greenways. Look at the school above, this is how a greenway should look when it’s finished, although in practice there would be some minor changes. However imagine as a first step that when the school was built, it had a ‘front garden’ that contained all of the elements of a greenway, when a new shopping centre is built, that too has a greenway like frontage. Bit by bit on designated routes, everything that gets built or refurbished has a chuck of greenway front garden built and eventually connected up.

If urban greenways are to exist at all, they cannot be imagined as projects in the conventional sense. They have to be thought of as intentions made durable over time.

The first prerequisite is almost paradoxical: an urban greenway cannot begin in the city. It needs something to connect to. A countryside greenway — continuous, legible, and already functioning — changes the meaning of the urban section entirely. It reframes it from a speculative amenity into a missing link. Without that external anchor, urban greenways remain abstract; with it, they become inevitable.

Once that anchor exists, the next step is not construction but declaration. A route must be sketched — lightly, strategically, clearly, but without urgency. This is not a line drawn with a deadline attached. It is a statement of intent: this is where the city will slowly soften. Crucially, this intent must not feel like a threat. Greenways in cities will outlast political cycles, funding rounds, and probably the people who first imagine them. In some places, they will take decades. In others, generations.

Progress, then, comes through accumulation rather than disruption.

I also have the idea that the road markings on roads that will eventually be repurposed as greenways, are changed to green. This would send a strong signal of long term intent, that would be understood nation wide

Every routine intervention becomes an opportunity. Any new building includes a frontage that will become greenway. When a road needs resurfacing, it is resurfaced with a new future in mind — narrower lanes, wider pavements, protected edges. When a sewer or gas main needs replacing, the work is done in a way that anticipates future planting, future paths, future reduction in through traffic. Nothing dramatic changes overnight, but nothing is wasted either.

Property is handled the same way. There is no mass clearance, no compulsory purchase frenzy. Instead, patience. When a house or commercial unit directly in the way comes up for sale, the greenway quietly acquires it. The building may remain for years, rented or repurposed, until its removal makes sense within a larger context. The absence of pressure is the strategy.

Roads themselves evolve gradually. A road designated as part of the future greenway is not immediately closed to cars. It simply stops being a through-route. Access remains, but priority shifts. Over time, traffic learns to go elsewhere. The city adjusts. What once felt like an artery slowly reveals itself as surplus.

Public investment reinforces the direction of travel. If a new park is needed, it is placed on the greenway route. Golf courses, playing fields, school fields, are all put on notice, their edges will need to be trimmed back. Car parks are put on notice. If flood mitigation or drainage improvements are required, they are integrated into the corridor. The greenway becomes the logical place to put good things — not because it already exists, but because it will.

Land use policy does much of the heavy lifting. The strips of land along and adjacent to the planned greenway are designated for mixed use: workshops, cafés, clinics, studios, and shops at ground level; apartments above. This does two things at once. It increases the economic value of being on the route, and it makes the idea of the greenway tangible to property owners long before it arrives. People are not pushed out; they are invited to imagine a better alternative.

Over time, this changes behaviour. Owners become more willing to sell. Developers become more willing to build in the right way. The greenway stops being a hypothetical imposition and starts to feel like an emerging asset.

This is not how megaprojects are usually discussed. There is no ribbon cutting at the beginning, no dramatic before-and-after. But it is how cities actually change: through alignment of intent, repetition of small moves, and patience measured in decades rather than quarters.

Urban greenways will never be easy. They will always be compromised, contested, and incomplete. But if they are treated as generational infrastructure — slowly assembled rather than aggressively imposed — they can become not just possible, but inevitable.

How cities actually change: the Amsterdam example

One of the most persistent myths about urban change is that it requires sudden, disruptive acts of political courage: blanket bans, overnight transformations, a clean break with the past. In practice, the cities that have changed most successfully have done so slowly, deliberately, and almost invisibly.

Amsterdam is a good example—not because it banned cars, but because it made space for something better without triggering collapse, flight, or loss of value.

Much of Amsterdam’s inner city once looked like many British towns do now: narrow streets, busy with traffic, cars parked tightly on both sides, public space reduced to a corridor for vehicles. The streets were functional, but unpleasant. No one lingered. Children were absent. Cycling existed, but it was squeezed.

The change did not begin with a grand redesign. It began with parking.

Residents already owning cars were issued parking permits. That was the political compromise. But crucially, those permits were not permanent entitlements. When someone moved out, their permit disappeared with them. No replacement. No reissue.

Over time—sometimes years—this simple rule began to thin out parked cars. First there was space on only one side of the street. That alone was enough to begin. Traffic could be calmed. A cycle track could appear. Trees could be planted. Pavements widened. The street could start to function as a place again, not just a storage facility for vehicles.

Then, gradually, parking disappeared altogether.

What’s important is what didn’t happen. Property values did not collapse. Streets did not become less desirable. In fact, the opposite occurred. These streets became quieter, greener, safer, and more attractive places to live. The people who moved in were not poorer or worse off—they simply didn’t need a private car stored outside their front door. The street selected for a different kind of resident, without coercion or displacement.

This is the pattern worth paying attention to.

Urban greenways don’t need to arrive as sweeping revolutions. They can emerge incrementally, block by block, street by street, through policies that reshape incentives rather than issue bans. One-way traffic instead of two-way. No through-traffic. No parking on one side, then eventually none at all. What replaces it isn’t emptiness, but value: trees, space, calm, movement, life.

And perhaps that is the real shift required: not learning how to build greenways in cities, but learning how to think in time again.

If at this point you are feeling overwhelmed by the challenge, I suggest reading this essay next!

But Greenways only really make sense when understood alongside these older networks, not instead of them.

The simplest way to think about Greenways is as beautiful highways designed for people. They are built for walking, cycling, and e-bikes at scale. They prioritise continuity, directness, safety, and calm. They connect places people actually need to move between: cities, towns, suburbs, villages, stations, and the countryside beyond. They are infrastructure, not improvisation, designed, not evolved.

That distinction matters. Much of the existing path network was never designed as transport infrastructure. It emerged historically, incrementally, and often accidentally. Footpaths follow ancient boundaries, agricultural logic, or the simple fact that someone once walked that way often enough for it to become formalised. Towpaths exist because canals needed horses. Riverside paths survive where land was left undeveloped or flood-prone. Their value today is enormous — but it is not the same value that a modern, human-scale transport network would aim to provide.

Greenways are about connection rather than exploration. They are wider, more direct, better surfaced, and designed for year-round use. They are graded, drained, seperated, and actively maintained. You can set off on one knowing you’ll make steady progress, that you won’t be forced into traffic, mud, or dead ends, and that the route will still work in winter, at night, and for children, older people, or cargo bikes. They form spines through the landscape: linking towns to one another, threading countryside into cities, cutting clean corridors across fragmented farmland, and doubling as long, continuous biodiversity routes.

A useful historical parallel helps sharpen this distinction.

Britain’s canal network was not accidental. It was ambitious, strategic infrastructure, deliberately designed to connect places efficiently. Canals were cut through the landscape with intent: engineered gradients, direct routes, planned junctions. They were, in effect, the first national logistics network. But they were designed for boats, not for people, and the paths that run alongside them were designed for horses. The fact that we now walk and cycle along them is a fortunate afterlife, not their original purpose.

Greenways are much closer in spirit to the canals themselves than to the paths beside them. They are planned, continuous, and purposeful. They aim to connect places directly and reliably. The difference is that Greenways are designed from the outset for human movement, and for beauty and biodiversity rather than extraction and trade.

Crucially, they are also far cheaper. A Greenway does not need locks, embankments, reservoirs, aqueducts, or complex water management. It does not need to resist the forces of moving tonnage or protect industrial infrastructure. As a result, Greenways can go more places. They can weave across farmland, follow contours, slip through urban gaps, and extend deep into landscapes where canals or railways would never have been viable. Their maintenance is simpler, lighter, and more distributed — closer to landscape stewardship than heavy engineering. They can also be built out over time, in a way the canal network never could, a greenway becomes useful long before it’s complete.

This stands in contrast to the footpath network, which evolved rather than being designed. Footpaths emerged from repeated use, agricultural necessity, and historical happenstance. They were never conceived as a coherent system. They were not planned strategically, not graded or surfaced for longevity, and not designed with long-term maintenance in mind. Their charm lies precisely in this informality, but it also explains their limitations as modern infrastructure.

Footpaths and towpaths do something Greenways never can, and should never try to replace. They wander. They climb. They detour. They go where no strategic planner would ever choose to run a national route. Footpaths head up into hills, through awkward gaps, into woods and along edges that only make sense on foot. They lead to views, shortcuts, oddities, and places whose value lies precisely in the fact that they are not efficient.

Towpaths and riversides have their own distinct character. They are slow, linear, intimate, and layered with history. They pass locks, bridges, back gardens, industrial remnants, pubs, wildlife niches, and stretches where stopping is the whole point. They reward lingering rather than movement. Trying to turn all of these into Greenways would be a mistake — a category error that would strip them of what makes them special.

This is where the motorway analogy stops being rhetorical and starts being structurally useful. Motorways did not replace A-roads, B-roads, or country lanes. They exist to do a specific job: move large numbers of vehicles between places quickly and safely. The rest of the road network remains, serving local access, variation, and character.

Greenways sit in exactly the same relationship to the existing walking and cycling network. They absorb the demand for efficient, everyday movement. In doing so, they reduce pressure elsewhere. A strong Greenway network would make narrow towpaths and fragile footpaths less congested, not more. People who want to get from A to B efficiently, but surrounded by beauty, would have somewhere appropriate to do it, leaving slower, more exploratory routes free to remain what they are.

In practice, networks overlap. Sometimes the only viable corridor between two places is an existing river or canal. In those cases, purism is unhelpful. The sensible response is not to pretend these routes are something they are not, but to upgrade them where appropriate. Some towpaths and riversides can be widened, better surfaced, properly drained, and actively maintained, bringing them closer to Greenway standards without erasing their character. This is not about turning every canal into a cycling superhighway; it is about recognising that some linear corridors already carry multiple functions, and that neglect simply pushes conflict and decay onto users and landscapes least able to absorb it.

The key idea is layering, not replacement. Greenways work best as part of a rich, multi-layered system: fast, calm, connective routes sitting alongside slower, more idiosyncratic ones; strategic corridors connecting to local paths rather than overwhelming them. Each layer does what it is best suited to do, and in doing so, relieves pressure on some, opens up connectivity to others.

Seen this way, Greenways are not an imposition on the countryside, nor an attempt to sanitise leisure paths. They are missing infrastructure — the equivalent of the motorway network we built for cars, but never built for people. And just as no one would argue that country lanes should disappear because motorways exist, there is no tension between Greenways and the paths we already love. There is only the opportunity to let each do its job properly, and to finally build a network that reflects how many people actually want to move through the world.

If at this point you are wondering about the existing National Cycling Network, like I was, then I wrote this essay specifically for you:

But this framing misses the real distinction. The difference is not between good routes and better routes. It is between two fundamentally different ideas of what movement is for. The National Cycle Network helps people find their way through the world as it already exists. Greenways propose a different way to move through the world. The two ideas could converge though, this essay attempts to highlight the difference in approach, one tactical, the other strategic, one immediately actionable, the other a generational project, one still car centric, the other car free, one all about the route, the other about beauty, biodiversity and economic opportunity and a new way to move through the world. In a way this greenway concept is a vision for something truly special, unique, something that celebrates the UK countryside and integrates urban and country life, one that goes well beyond leisure cycling.

Most modern movement is functional. We are channelled along spaces designed primarily for vehicles, efficiency, and traffic flow, even when we are not in cars. Walking and cycling often take place in leftover margins: narrow pavements, shared paths squeezed between fences and hedges, quiet roads tolerated rather than designed for human presence. Routes emerge within these constraints. They are overlays on a system that was never meant for people, they were meant for care. They say, in effect, that you may pass here.

Greenways reverse that relationship. They are not permissions carved out of hostile space but environments shaped around human movement from the start. When movement is designed with intention rather than negotiation, it stops feeling effortful and precarious. It becomes enriching, calm, continuous, and safe. You are no longer threading your way through a system built for something else. You are moving through a place that’s designed for you to be there.

This shift changes how movement feels. A route is something you follow, often with attention divided between wayfinding, surfaces, and traffic. A Greenway is something you experience. It is shaped by what it feels like to move at human speed. Sightlines are open rather than enclosed. Trees and planting are used to frame views, provide shade, mark seasons, and support biodiversity, not merely to meet movement requirements.

This attention to beauty is not just decorative. It is functional. People walk further, cycle more often, and linger longer in places that inspire joy, feel generous and look alive. Calm reduces stress. Openness reduces conflict. Beauty changes behaviour in ways that signage and enforcement never can. A Greenway invites rather than instructs, and that invitation alters how people relate to everyday journeys.

Greenways are also built for ordinary, daily life rather than exceptional trips. They are designed to carry commuting, shopping, visiting, schooling, exercise, and wandering without requiring people to adopt a particular identity or level of confidence. Width, continuity, and surface quality are chosen to support children, older people, mobility aids, and future forms of light transport we have not yet named. Crossings are designed as moments of continuity rather than interruption. Villages are treated as places to divert into, not obstacles to pass through.

This is why Greenways favour separate countryside routes, rather than paths beside roads rather than sharing space with fast-moving vehicles wherever possible. The aim is not simply to reduce danger but to remove the constant cognitive load of negotiation. When people do not have to be vigilant all the time, movement becomes something they can do while thinking, talking, or simply being. Greenways make space not just for bodies, but for attention.

Where people move slowly and predictably, economic life follows. Greenways are explicitly designed to create new edges: places where cafés, small businesses, workshops, farm stalls, and services naturally want to locate. This is not an accidental benefit but a core part of the strategic intent. By shaping movement at human scale, Greenways increase land value without consuming land, support local economies without large developments, and make rural diversification and urban density work together rather than in opposition.

This is how historic infrastructure functioned. Canals, promenades, and railways reshaped economies because they reshaped how people moved through space. Greenways follow the same logic, but at far lower cost and with far greater ecological, social and economic return. They are not leisure amenities bolted onto the side of the economy. They are productive systems that quietly generate value over time.

Perhaps the most important difference between routes and Greenways is invisible. Routes often survive through goodwill. Maintenance is negotiated, standards vary, and responsibility is fragmented. Over time, quality erodes. Greenways demand a different mindset. They are managed as long-term strategic public infrastructure: designed to endure, funded to last, and maintained as assets rather than tolerated as opportunities. This is not about perfection, but about commitment across decades.

The National Cycle Network showed that alternatives to the car were possible within the world we had. Greenways ask a more radical question. What if the way we move every day actually felt good? What if movement itself became a source of health, connection, and economic life rather than a problem to be managed?

That is not a better route. It is a different way to move through the world.

If you’d like to read more about the specifics of greenways, then this is a good essay to read next:

If you’d like to read more about the need for ambition in our car free infrastructure, this is a good essay to read:

The most cited example remains The High Line in New York City. Much has been written about its downsides, particularly the speed and scale of gentrification it triggered. But from an infrastructure perspective, that outcome is not mysterious or even undesirable. The High Line demonstrated that when you insert a continuous, high-quality, car-free corridor into the urban fabric, land around it revalues itself. Buildings turn toward it. Developers compete to address it. Density rises where it makes sense to rise.

This is often framed as a failure of policy rather than a success of design, but that misses the point. Gentrification here is not random displacement; it is signal. It tells us that cities are desperate for legible, human-scale spines around which higher-density, mixed-use development can cluster. The problem was never that the High Line made land valuable. The problem was that the city lacked a framework to steer that value toward inclusive, mixed, and purposeful outcomes.

London’s Regent’s Canal offers a longer, slower example of the same forces at work. Once an industrial artery, the canal has gradually become one of the city’s most loved pedestrian and cycling routes. What’s interesting is how development has responded over decades rather than years. Warehouses became apartments. New housing faced the water. Cafés, small offices, and cultural spaces appeared at ground level. The towpath functions as a linear greenway threading through dense neighbourhoods, allowing movement across the city without reference to the road network.

Regent’s Canal shows what happens when a greenway is allowed to mature organically. It also reveals its limitations. The path is often narrow, crowded, and inconsistent, because it was never designed as primary infrastructure. Yet despite those considerable constraints, people tolerate inconvenience because the experience of moving through the city along water, greenery, and active frontages is so much better than the alternatives.

On a larger and more explicit scale, the Atlanta BeltLine demonstrates what happens when a city treats a greenway as a development framework rather than a recreational add-on. Built along former rail corridors, the BeltLine was always intended to drive regeneration. It has done exactly that. Low-density, underused land has been replaced with higher-density housing, mixed-use development, and new commercial activity oriented directly onto the trail. Again, gentrification followed—but here it was openly acknowledged as part of the mechanism. The challenge became managing it, not pretending it wouldn’t happen.

At the edge of cities, waterfront greenways reveal the same pattern. Manhattan’s riverside paths, Vancouver’s Vancouver Seawall, and countless coastal promenades show how quickly linear public space becomes the organising principle for adjacent development. Buildings facing traffic feel defensive and noisy; buildings facing greenways feel calmer, more valuable, and more social. Ground floors open up. Residential density becomes acceptable because the public realm compensates for private space.

Even small towns demonstrate the effect. The promenade at Grange-over-Sands is essentially a simple greenway between town and sea. There is nothing architecturally dramatic about it, yet it quietly supports cafés, hotels, apartments, and constant everyday use. It’s most notable for the fast that the beautiful planting along it’s edge is all managed by volunteers, providing inspiration for how this could happen more widely on greenways.

One of the clearest demonstrations of what greenways can be is Cheonggyecheon Stream in Seoul. Once buried beneath concrete and an elevated motorway, the stream was uncovered and restored into a linear corridor of water, planting, walking routes, and civic space running through the heart of the city. Crucially, this was not just a beautiful project but a piece of urban infrastructure: it reduced local temperatures through evapotranspiration, improved air quality, lowered flood risk, and provided a calm, direct route through an otherwise intense urban environment. Korea has repeated this logic elsewhere, notably with Seoullo 7017, an obsolete flyover transformed into a planted pedestrian route connecting neighbourhoods that had previously been severed by traffic. Taken together, these projects show that greenways do not have to be rural, picturesque, or peripheral. They can be carved out of the hardest, most car-dominated urban fabric, replacing single-purpose transport infrastructure with something multifunctional: movement, nature, cooling, and everyday civic life layered into one continuous, enriching route.

Across all these examples, the lesson is consistent. Greenways do not merely coexist with development; they attract and organise it. They provide the confidence developers need to build at higher density, because the quality of life they create is shared and durable. In that sense, gentrification is not a bug but a lever. It supplies the financial motivation to replace low-density, low-value, or hostile urban developments with something denser, more mixed, and more human—provided the greenway itself is protected as public infrastructure.

What most of these examples lack, however, is full continuity from city to countryside, safe cycling and strategic vision. They remain urban fragments, loops, or edges. That is not a failure of the idea, but a reflection of how cautiously cities tend to build new infrastructure for people rather than cars.

The opportunity now is to take what these places have shown us and apply it deliberately. To build greenways first where land is easiest to assemble, then let them pull development and density toward them over time. To accept that displacement pressures must be managed, not denied. And to recognise that without this kind of linear, human-scale backbone, cities will continue to densify in ways that feel brittle, congested, and joyless.

Accidentally created, or poorly designed urban greenways already work. The task now is not to prove their value, but to multiply their success many times over with greater consistency, careful design, strategic planning and multi-generational ambition.

The next essay takes a look at some of the challenges we face building urban greenways!

Within and near towns and cities, the Greenway feels almost generous to a fault. The surfaces are fully accessible. The lighting is solar. Seating appears often enough that no one needs to plan their rest in advance. Signage is clear, high quality, and frequent. Micro play parks work perfectly here too.

This is where the Greenway becomes part of daily life. Commuting, morning walks. School-runs. Short rides after work. Evening strolls that don’t require planning or equipment or justification.

As you move further out, the tone changes. The services thin out, but the continuity remains. The surfaces are still smooth enough, the route still clear, but the planting becomes wilder, the views longer, the pauses more deliberate. This is where day walks and longer rides unfold naturally, but still convenient and easily accessible without needing to get in a car. Fruit stops and picnic areas have their place here. Composting toilets could be placed where they are needed and can still be serviced, because cargo carrying service eBikes can easily reach them.

Further still, the Greenway begins to resemble a long-distance trail — but without ever losing its sense of intention. The path remains wide and separated. Seating becomes simpler, there’s no lighting. The landscape takes over. What changes is not feel, it’s still distinctly a greenway, but it’s now more natural and construction cost is lower.

One of the quiet radical ideas embedded in Greenways is that productive landscapes and public spaces do not need to be separated. Near population centres, the planting is deliberately edible. Fruit trees, berry bushes, and nut trees punctuate the route. Every few miles, small “fruit stops” offer shade, seating, and seasonal abundance.

This is not a gimmick. It is a reminder that landscapes can give back as well as look beautiful. Fruit stops would be the ideal areas to be adopted, either by volunteers, organisations like the Women’s Institute or by local businesses, to make sure that dropped fruit ends up in compost piles, well away from the picnic areas, grass is cut, benches and tables maintained etc. This is encourages a cultural change, where people and organisations learn the benefits of the triple bottom line: the need to look after monetary profit, employees and community, I will come back to this idea in another newsletter.

Further out, path are slightly lower quality, planting shifts toward biodiversity: berry-rich hedges, wildflower meadow edges, water management features, and wildlife corridors that thread through farmland with minimal disturbance. I’ve not shown it in these concept images, but farm tracks would need to cross over the greenways and special consideration would need to be given to fencing, gates, reducing mud etc.

Greenways do not exist in isolation. They act as spines, quietly connecting the wider landscape. Footpaths, bridleways, quiet roads, and local tracks connect into them, becoming easier to navigate and more widely used as a result. Instead of a confusing patchwork of footpaths that might go nowhere, there is a welcoming carefully planned, accessible spine that invites exploration and connection.

That is what makes Greenways special.

Not that they are green.

But that they are designed.

If at this point you are wondering, how greenways fit into our existing network of paths, tow paths and cycle paths, then this is the essay for you:

This is a topic I’ll return to many times as I explore the details.

The countryside problem we already have

Most arable farmland in the UK makes little or no profit. Many farmers survive through a combination of subsidy, debt, and payments for environmental services. These services — hedgerows, wildflower strips, water capture, biodiversity — are undeniably valuable, but they provide little direct utility for most people.

For the public, countryside restoration remains abstract. Most people never see the hedges, the birds, the flowers, or the waterways they are paying to restore. Access is limited, footpaths are often poorly marked or maintained, unsuitable for bikes, and usually reachable only by car.

The result is a strange contradiction: we pay to restore nature, but design it so most people cannot meaningfully experience it.

How countryside Greenways change the equation

A national greenway network would be designed around connectivity rather than isolation: connecting towns to countryside, villages to villages, towns to towns, and cities to cities.

These would be relatively high-throughput human networks. Not motorways, but corridors with enough regular movement to support small-scale economic activity along their edges: farm shops, cafés, repair huts, craft workshops, overnight camping, B&Bs, shepherd huts, and youth hostels.

Greenways would need construction and ongoing maintenance, but the funding required is not wildly different from what we already spend on agricultural and environmental payments. The difference is that greenways would give trees, hedges, meadows, and waterways a human purpose as well as an ecological one.

Farmers could be compensated for the land used, but could also gain steady income from stewardship, maintenance, and enterprise along the routes. Instead of being marginal producers of cheap commodities, they could become visible stewards of a shared future — a role with pride, status, and connection.

That connection matters. When farmers connect directly with the public, innovation becomes possible in ways that are almost impossible when food is sold anonymously into global supply chains. Market gardens, orchards, direct sales, education, hospitality, and local processing all become viable.

This is a vision of a rural economy the next generation of farmers might actually want to inherit.

Urban Greenways: harder, but more powerful

Urban greenways are more challenging, but potentially even more transformative.

Unlike the countryside, cities are dense, contested, and expensive. But they are also where greenways deliver the greatest returns: reduced car dependence, improved health, new business formation, and more efficient land use.

My instinct is that greenways would grow from the countryside inward, connecting first to existing assets: canals, rivers, old railway lines, parks, allotments, and cycle paths. Long-term masterplans would identify desired routes.

Then, gradually, through redevelopment, selective compulsory purchase, road reconfiguration, and one-way systems, greenways would weave deeper into towns and cities. This is not theoretical. Amsterdam did it. Paris is doing it. London is doing it — just not yet at sufficient scale, speed or beauty.

Why the economics work

As greenways become established, opportunities emerge along their edges. Low-density housing becomes economically irrational and is replaced by medium-density housing: shops and cafés at street level, apartments above, service roads behind.

This is exactly what we have seen happen along rivers and canals, often with almost no strategic planning. At their simplest, Greenways would just extend that logic deliberately and at scale.

The kinds of businesses that thrive along these corridors are not accidental. Large-scale retail, extractive logistics, and industrial food production depend on cars, trucks, and heavy machinery. They do not fit human-scale movement.

What does fit are small-scale food production, cafés, bakeries, repair shops, crafts, hospitality, and stewardship — work that is local, relational, and difficult to automate. Greenways act as economic filters, selecting for forms of work that remain meaningful and resilient in a post-AI economy.

A generational investment

This needs to be understood as a multi-generational project — not a quick fix, but an investment in how we live decades from now.

Imagine children growing up watching lifeless monocultures gradually transform into greenways. Over time, those greenways become more biodiverse. As biodiversity increases, so does footfall. As footfall grows, so does economic activity. Gradually, large fields give way to orchards, market gardens, and a more human-scale food economy.

This is not retreat from modernity. It is balance.

Dense cities minutes away from greenspace. Countryside accessible and economically vibrant. Technology without disembodiment.

A different measure of success

The question we should be asking is not how efficiently we can make and move goods or maximise output, but something more fundamental: what public luxuries can we build that allows ordinary people to live grounded, meaningful lives in an age of technological abundance?

A national greenways network is one such luxury and luxury does a lot of work here, it’s not just a muddy track next to a field!

Greenways are a public luxury in the richest sense: infrastructure that expands freedom, restores purpose, nourishes body and mind, and offers a unifying direction for the future.

The next essay takes a look at countryside greenways in more detail.

We seem to be sleepwalking into a world we are not prepared for: one in which AI strips away much routine — and increasingly creative — work, leaving many people without purpose, direction, or livelihood. To comfort us, we are offered platitudes: more leisure time, or new kinds of work we haven’t even imagined yet.

What’s missing is a unifying vision for how we actually live in that world.

Without new ideas, much of this supposed freedom will likely be spent sitting at home staring at screens, or stuck in traffic trying to reach overcrowded beauty spots. We will have more time, but fewer places for that time to meaningfully go.

I’ve been trying to think of alternatives. One of them is the idea of creating a new piece of national infrastructure to rival the motorway network, the electricity grid, or the canals: a national mission to build a network of Greenways, beginning in the countryside and gradually weaving into towns and cities.

What are Greenways?

Properly conceived, greenways are not just a nice place to walk. They are fast, direct, beautiful, human-scale corridors linking cities to fields, neighbourhoods to countryside, and people to food, work, and nature.

Designed for walking, cycling, e-bikes, and emerging forms of micro-mobility, greenways turn thirty minutes of travel into a gateway to new possibilities. They are public luxury not simply because they are beautiful, but because they radically expand what ordinary people can access.

Within cities, greenways act as mobility spines around which medium-density neighbourhoods naturally become desirable. Living near them makes it possible to work part-time in traditional professions — law, marketing, engineering, programming — while also engaging in grounded activity: leisure, growing food, repair, care, craft, and civic building.

As AI compresses professional work into fewer days, greenways make plural lives practical rather than exhausting. Freedom here is not escape from the city, but the ability to move through our world in a new enriching way.

As these corridors extend beyond the urban edge, their value multiplies. They become wildlife corridors, economic stimulators, and biodiversity engines, stitching together fragmented habitats while giving people direct access to the countryside. Crucially, this does not mean sprawl. The countryside does not get consumed by the city; instead, it becomes reachable, integrated, understood.

There’s so many exciting ideas that unfold, once you really explore the potential and that’s what this substack is going to explore.

Where the idea comes from

My inspiration for greenways comes from five main sources.

The first is a phrase I first heard George Monbiot use: “personal sufficiency and public luxury.” Greenways embody this idea. They are shared spaces so good they can feel better than any private alternative. A functioning tram network liberates people from car ownership. Beautiful parks reduce the need for second homes. Libraries, pools, and cultural spaces allow people to live richly without living wastefully.

The second is the UK canal network. It is now one of our national treasures — deeply loved — but also poorly designed for walking and cycling, extremely expensive to maintain, and almost impossibly expensive to expand.

The third is John Seymour’s idea of taking a single thousand-acre farm employing a handful of people to grow a monoculture, and instead creating a mosaic of small, ten-acre market gardens — each employing several people, growing diverse crops, and earning a living wage. I love the idea of patches of farmland bordering on the edge of greeways, gradually transitioning to market gardens.

And the fourth is Amsterdam, a city that was as car-dominated fifty years ago as many UK cities are today, but which transformed itself through long-term vision, determination, and political courage, into a city built for people.

Finally we have the incredibly visionary book Garden Cities of To-morrow, a book that inspired me so much that I have one of it’s illustrations - framed - above the desk in my office.

AI: threat and opportunity

If we believe markets, politicians, and tech CEOs, AI is about to grow GDP and improve life for everyone. I remain unconvinced. Some people - and many companies - will certainly get richer. But I’m far from convinced this will translate into broadly shared prosperity or a world better aligned with human flourishing.

Progress is already outpacing our ability to adapt. Everywhere we look, modern life is mismatched to the way our bodies and minds evolved to live. AI risks accelerating that mismatch rather than resolving it.

So I’m working with a few assumptions.

Many people will lose their current jobs, or those jobs will have to be shared. There will be an explosion of creative and technical work, but we will also need new human-scale work — work that is social, physical, local, and fiddly: cafés, bakeries, market gardening, repair, low-tech construction, crafts, stewardship. And some of the wealth generated by automation must be redirected into public luxuries aligned with human wellbeing, rather than endless consumption or evermore healthcare or welfare. We need solutions that makes us healthier and economically active too. While greenways will be great on foot, I’m also assuming huge innovation in bike like evehicles, the perfect way to move further on greenways.

Greenways are not the only answer. But they might be a good one.

They offer a way to anchor people, purpose, and place in a world where traditional work is increasingly automated.

In the next essay, I want to move from vision to practicality, and ask the harder question: how could this actually work?

Greenways are not public footpaths. They are not painted cycle lanes squeezed onto hostile roads, or leftover strips of land treated as an afterthought. They are human-scale infrastructure, designed to be used daily. Places to walk, cycle, move, pause, meet, and spend time without needing to buy anything, own much, or get in a car. Places that make ordinary life calmer, healthier, and richer by default. They are designed to be affordable, cost effective, stimulate the economy and provide a springboard for broader change.

Beauty matters here, it’s designed in from the start, people should love them, they are a new way to move through the world. Beauty also leads to function, people care for, use, and return to places that bring them joy. A Greenway should feel closer in spirit to a great canal path, promenade, or civic square than to a transport corridor. Something you choose because it feels good to be there, not because you are being forced out of a car.

But Greenways and this substack, is also a lens, not a single proposal.

They open up much bigger questions. About the role of the countryside in our everyday lives. About how access to nature and working with nature can help us thrive in a post-AI world. About the idea of public luxury — shared systems so good they expand freedom and experience for everyone, while reducing dependence on private consumption. About health, biodiversity, land use, and local economies. About how we rebuild a sense of shared civic life without retreating from modernity or pretending technology can be uninvented. About being proud of the place we live in again.

This a bold vision, to be delivered by a long-horizon project. If the concept becomes a reality it will be the work of a generation, but what a legacy we would be building for our children! This substack is a long-horizon project too, I’m not interested in being popular on social media or overwhelming readers with posts every few days. Essays will appear when there’s something worth saying, typically every few weeks and they’re written to stand alone, age well and be discussed. Think less “newsletter”, more slowly assembled body of ideas and discussion around those ideas.

No doubt at this point you are thinking, this all sounds nice but, it’s too hard, will take too long, cost too much etc, so I suggest reading this essay.

If you still think it’s too hard take a look at this essay, that describes right now, opportunities to create close to a hundreds of miles of greenways, almost as a side effect of major infrastructure projects:

If you’re new here, a good place to start is the first essay, link below, which lays out the core problem and the opportunity Greenways represent. Everything else builds outward from there.

You don’t need to agree with everything here. Curiosity is enough.

Like all of my other work, this substack is free access, but you can pay to subscribe if you can afford it. You won’t get access to anything different, but you will get the satisfaction that you supported me in developing and communicating these ideas.