Mapping Britain’s 1930s cycle tracks

British Cycle Tracks went live today. It’s Carlton Reid’s study of the cycle tracks the Ministry of Transport paid councils to build beside new arterial roads between 1934 and 1945. There were more than 100 of them, modelled on ones in the Netherlands, and most were soon forgotten. Carlton spent seven years finding them again through archives, old newspapers and a lot of Google Street View, with the help of more than 900 Kickstarter backers. I did the coding and the maps.

Carlton got in touch because he wanted something special for the maps, and he’d seen my Transcontinental Race site.

The maps

The maps are the part I enjoyed most. I like the challenge of getting an idea across clearly, and I like poking around old maps to see what’s changed. Each track has its own page with a map you can swipe: the Ordnance Survey’s 1:25,000 map of 1937–61 on one side, a modern map on the other, and the track drawn over both. Drag the handle across and the old map gives way to today’s. Under the bonnet it’s two Mapbox maps stacked on top of each other and joined with Mapbox’s Compare plugin.

My favourite bit was spotting the ones I’ve ridden myself as modern-day cycle tracks, like that very first one, on the A40 near Hanger Lane.

Plotting all the tracks was a bit of a schlep. Having said that, it was interesting to zoom in on so many different parts of the country.

The trickiest part was the home page, where a 1930s photo of the Great West Road at Osterley fades into the same view today as you scroll down. Getting that to work within the website’s theme took some doing.

Not just history

Carlton’s case is that the best of these tracks could be renovated and brought up to modern standards. A report for the Department for Transport looked at twelve of them, and Leicester City Council has already used the research in a successful bid for part of a £2.2 million renovation.

If there’s a 1930s arterial road near you, have a look on the big map. There might be a cycle track hiding beside it.