Bristol’s Many-Layered Footpaths
Fig. 1. Photograph of a footpath through The Gully on Bristol’s Downs. Credit: Lena Ferriday, 2020.
As the In All Our Footsteps project team are demonstrating, rights of way are inherently historical: from the legal recognition of a public route depending on two decades of its use, to the experiences of the countryside that have been physically and interpretively imprinted into them. And many voices have been historically involved in the creation of footpaths. Nowhere is this clearer than in the aftermath of the National Parks and Access to the Countryside Act (1949), under which local government, the third sector and citizens acquired responsibility for designating a right of way network. Yet in the decades before that Act, the provision of footpaths was hardly uniformly coordinated or singularly organised; it was similarly dependent on the subjectivities of local councils, tourist bodies and the users themselves.
In a recently published article, I interrogated the dynamics of pedestrian and vehicular movement through Bristol in the early twentieth century to demonstrate the central role played by guidebooks in shaping urban mobility, both materially and subjectively. Mapping the routes depicted in these guidebooks revealed the extent to which these texts dovetailed with the efforts of local authorities to produce accessible routeways for visiting pedestrians. In the article, these methods were used to highlight the key role played by guidebooks in shaping urban mobility and drawing attention to subjective impressions.
Implicit within these guidebook texts were the movements of visitors themselves, which a combination of mapping methodologies and qualitative analysis can further draw out. The footpaths through Bristol’s green spaces were managed by committees of the city council, but consistently relied on the assumed and very real preferences of those who used them. Approaching these textual sources from a spatial angle, then, not only reveals their value for the interrogation of urban mobility, but also expanding the histories of footpaths, pedestrian movement, and rights of way.
Totalling 442 acres in size and secured for the public in 1861, Clifton and Durdham Downs were for instance ‘an open plateau of grass’ interspersed with woodland areas (fig. 1). The area was extremely popular with tourists, connecting them not only to Brunel’s famed Suspension Bridge but also providing the large expanse of open park space in the city, valuable for ‘healthy outdoor exercise’ in the form of cricket, golf, football, or promenading.[1] Guidebooks to the city unanimously directed visitors to this area and guided them to explore the space via the clearly marked ‘paths, walks and drives [which] cut across the level areas of the Downs in all directions’.[2] The Downs area was maintained by a twosome of local authorities: the Sanitary Committee, responsible for the care of roads across the city, and the Downs Committee, responsible for maintaining the landscapes including and surrounding the Downs. Yet mapping their decisions reveals the underlying influence of the pedestrians themselves on the increase of access to this area.
Fig. 2. Map designating the parallel positioning of the Belvedere and Eltoe Road footpaths on the 1910 Ordnance Survey. Credit: Lena Ferriday and Digimap (Crown Copyright and Landmark Information Group Limited, 2023).
Finances often constrained the construction of new footpaths, even when they were explicitly requested. In October 1908, a letter from a resident was received by the Downs Committee, proposing ‘two new pathways [be constructed] on Durdham Downs, leading from Belvedere Road to Westbury Road’ (orange in the image on the left, fig. 2). The proposal for these footpaths was denied by the committee, who stated they ‘cannot see their way to make new paths at present.’[3]
At a meeting on 11 January 1912, however, a ‘Foreman informed the Committee that the Downs on the Southern side of the road leading from Etloe Road to the Westbury Road was in a very muddy condition’ (red on fig. 2). Here, it was ‘suggested that a footpath be made there’, and the committee ‘Resolved that the suggested work be carried out’.[4] In this second instance, mud marks on the ground formed what is known as a desire path, indicating a well-travelled route. Mapping these two routes onto the 1910 Ordnance Survey map reveals that the rejected and accepted footpaths ran parallel to each other, providing very similar connection to Westbury Road. The material evidence of movement, provided by the churned-up grass, thus made a powerful case for the introduction of a footpath to a greater extent than the suggestion of a resident in 1908. Mapping the outcome of committee minutes reveals, then, the implicit material influence of pedestrian movement on the network of footpaths in this area.
Mapping these records demonstrates that the movement of pedestrians was consistently prioritised by the local council, despite the powerful role played by the Bristol Tramways and Carriage Company in organising the city’s mobility, with their monopoly on public transport within the city. In 1921 a plan was submitted to the Committee proposing a ‘new road from the top of Fountain Hill to Upper Belgrave Road (top of Worrall Road)’, shown in orange below (fig. 3). The construction of this road would have been of great benefit to vehicular movement in the city. It was intended to provide a shortcut (in blue) to vehicles travelling to the popular areas of Clifton and Brunel’s famed Suspension Bridge, bypassing the busy Westbury Road (green) and reducing congestion around the Downs perimeter (red). In response, however, the Committee resolved ‘that nothing be done in the matter’.[5]
Fig. 3. Map demonstrating the Fountain Hill and Worrall Road intersection on the 1910 Ordnance Survey. Credit: Lena Ferriday and Digimap (Crown Copyright and Landmark Information Group Limited, 2023).
Examining the Ordnance Survey map reveals that the proposed road was to be positioned on a pre-existing footpath (fig. 4). This path provided a valuable point of pedestrian access to the Downs, running across its width and keeping pedestrians from walking on the turf through mud in adverse weather, or disrupting sporting activities taking place during the summer. The construction of a road here, then, would have thrown this footpath onto the vehicular route, compromising pedestrian movement in the face of tramways and cars, as had been common around the Downs across the preceding decades.[6] While not dictated by physical changes to the ground, a spatial approach to the archival traces left by local councils reveals the indirect importance of pedestrians’ movement to decisions made regarding footpaths.
Fig. 4. Ordnance Survey map, 1898–1939. Credit: British Library and Know Your Place.
Paying attention to the spatial dimensions of both pedestrian networks and the practical and imaginative frameworks that organised them, reveals the priorities and experiences latent within the gravel ground of the footpath itself. We often unquestioningly access footpaths, absentmindedly traversing their routes. But historically, pedestrians have also consistently influenced their production and maintenance either directly or, as in the case of Bristol, implicitly, through our physical or potential movement on the ground. Examining textual records spatiality – be it through guidebooks or local council records – reveals the many actors that have historically been agents in producing, managing and experiencing the local environment, with footpaths as a key axis for these processes.
Lena Ferriday is in her third year of a History PhD at the University of Bristol, co-supervised with the University of Exeter and funded by the AHRC South West and Wales Doctoral Training Partnership. Her thesis explores sensory and embodied experiences of the environment, in nineteenth century Devon and Cornwall. She has recently published her first article open access with the Journal of Historical Geography.
Endnotes
[1] G. F. Stone, Bristol: As It Was and As It Is. A Record of Fifty Years’ Progress (Bristol: Walter Reid, 1909), p. 225, Bristol Archives, 42512/3; The New Guide to Bristol & Clifton, and the Bristol Channel Circuit, ed. by James Baker, 4th edn (Bristol: J. Baker and Son, 1906), pp. 80, 113, Bristol Archives, 40946/1; How To See Bristol: A Complete, Up-to-Date & Profusely Illustrated Guide to Bristol, Clifton and Neighbourhood, 10th edn (Bristol: J. W. Arrowsmith Ltd., 1910), p. 56, Bristol Archives, 43211/6.
[2] Baker, p. 79; The Graphic Guide to Bristol and Clifton (Bristol: The Bristol Printing and Publishing Co., Ltd, 1923), p. 22, Bristol Archives, 35510/BCC/2/9; Stone, p. 224; How to See Bristol, p. 56; The ‘Borough’ Guide to Clifton, ed. by J Burrow (London: Burrow’s Travel Centre, 1924), p. 18, British Library General Reference Collection, 10354.a.229.
[3] Downs Committee, ‘Minutes of the Downs Committee, 1896-1910’ (Bristol, 1910), p. 416, Bristol Archives, M/BCC/DOW/1/5.
[4] Downs Committee, ‘Minutes of the Downs Committee, 1910-1925’ (Bristol, 1925), p. 50, Bristol Archives, M/BCC/DOW/1/6.
[5] Downs Committee, ‘Minutes of the Downs Committee, 1910-1925’, p. 321.
[6] Downs Committee, ‘Minutes of the Downs Committee, 1896-1910’, p. 432.