With one year ending and another beginning, here’s Daniel Raven-Ellison with reasons to be cheerful, and to keep being ambitious!
I’m Slow Ways founder Dan Raven-Ellison, and I first imagined Slow Ways as an intercity network. It soon became clear to me that it should connect all our towns and villages too.
I’ve since come to the opinion that it should be possible to walk to any address in the country.
If people can drive somewhere, they should be able to walk there too. Right?
So, collaborating to find and share good ways to go is not good enough. We must have new and better rights of way, paths and access too.
I love Slow Ways for its unifying, positive, generous and adventurous spirit. I love how it generates connections, possibilities and opportunities.
But Slow Ways has a deeply serious side too.
Not having a safe, inclusive and connected walking network is too costly – and the cost does not sit on the balance sheet of our government and council’s transport departments. It is being paid for in the length and quality of our lives.
Having safe, inclusive and connected walking routes can give people more and better days of life. That’s the prize.
Looking back, 2024 has been another awesome year for Slow Ways. Lots of people use the word ‘awesome’ too easily, but when we’re talking about Slow Ways our effort truly is just that.
Slow Ways started in 2020; people have shared nearly 10,000 walking routes. Added together these routes are 140,000 km (87,000 miles) long. That’s something like 3.5 laps of the equator.
And they’re not just random routes that people have created for an unknown purpose. They have all been designed with a common purpose – to help people walk the best possible routes between communities.
Our community has shared nearly 15,000 route reviews that add up to over 160,000 km (99,000 miles) and nearly 2.5 million words. That’s 166 words per review or 16 words per kilometre.
Thanks to all that reviewing, 5,300 routes have been given good reviews. 4,000 of those have been rated 4 or 5 stars! And we’ve found and surveyed over 1,000km of obstacle free ‘Y’ graded paths.
That work also means that we’ve got 2,200 triple-checked and verified routes, and that includes 63 cities connected to each other in our core intercity network!
In all, a third of the network is now either verified or surveyed.
Here are all of the routes rated four or five stars, or verified:
Wow wow wow! What an incredible team effort. This has only been possible thanks to people like you – reading this, sharing this, chipping-in donations and exploring routes.
I’ve personally loved exploring old and new Slow Ways – and hope you have too. Slow Ways has given me the motivation to explore all kinds of places I would not have otherwise visited, and I’ve really enjoyed connecting up places and routes across South West England and beyond.
We’ve had some other big wins in 2024 too.
We published our new Slow Ways pocket atlas with Urban Good CIC (got your copy yet?), lots of people took up the Slow Ways 2024 walking challenge, we started our Wayfarers volunteering programme and collaborated with lots of groups to share stories from inspiring Slow Ways adventures with both our Tales and Trails projects.
We successfully launched our experimental Make Ways pilot. This was thanks to funding from 545 crowdfunder supporters, Aviva and Paths for All. It’s brilliant seeing good ways, bad ways and wishes for new ways being coloured in across the country. We’ve been doing lots of testing and learning, and you can expect much more from Make Ways next year.
And we’ve loved working with our advisory boards, sounding pools and all the people who have helped to shape our work so far.
Looking forward, we have big plans for 2025.
Now we’ve checked so much of the network, we’re going to be doing more to champion and celebrate great routes.
Further into the year we’ll be launching a new, better, stronger, faster and easier to use web platform. Expect things to look very different and feel much better.
You can expect some fun new challenges too!
All of our work over the last 4.5 years has been made possible thanks to gifts of time or money from thousands of people and lots of organisations. If you like what we are doing and would like to support our work financially, please click here to give a one-off or regular donation.
As it’s the end of the year, I’d like to do that perennial and important thing of giving thanks to everyone who’s helped to make Slow Ways the success that it is.
I’d like to thank every contributor and especially those that have challenged themselves to go further! Thank you to everyone who has shared something about Slow Ways and helped to spread the world. Thank you to everyone who has chipped in financially, and especially the National Lottery Community Fund who are our biggest funder and Paths for All who had faith in Make Ways.
And thanks to our brilliant, warm and talented extended past and present team: Hannah, Julian, Dan, Eva, Darren, Ingrina, Ben, Joao, Lara, Richard, Saira, Charlie, Dom, Gary, Rowena, Mohammed, Debbie, Sophia, Yusra and Nia.
Let’s see what we can achieve together in 2025.
See you on a Slow Way?
Daniel
