John Grimshaw

This audio clip is from a series of 100 life history interviews with environmental campaigners in the UK, 1970-2020. A quotation from this recording features in the book Voices for Change, published by UCL Press in November 2026 (available in print as well as a free PDF download). The full interview, along with the summaries, transcripts and recordings for this and the rest of the interview collection, is available at the British Library (Sound and Moving Image Collection, under the shelf-mark C2037). For more information, including educational materials and other resources, visit the Oral History of the Environmental Movement project website at www.royalholloway.ac.uk/ohemQuotation:So the first thing I did, this was all whilst I was still working with this wonderful firm, was to produce a plan of cycling routes in Bristol that followed the contours because it’s a very hilly city of course. Because I had produced that plan and circulated it to a few people, when we got to the Arab oil crisis in ’77, Friends of the Earth, a number of groups, started worrying about transport. I think up till that time, they hadn’t really. They started worrying because of oil embargos and at that time they saw resources depletion as being the problem as opposed to climate change because climate change hadn’t really hit the public conscious in the mid-70s. So there was a rally that Friends of the Earth organised and for some reason I was asked to speak to it at Castle Park. I just gave a wild speech and said well let’s set up a campaign group to focus on cycling. It seemed to be deliverable.So about twenty of us met in the pub down there, the Nova Scotia, in July ’77 and set up the campaign group. So all this time it was a voluntary organisation from my point of view. We did about a year of campaigning with the city. We had demonstrations. We had a huge demonstration in Castle Park and the hotel that overlooked it complained so the council planted trees where we demonstrated so we couldn’t demonstrate there again, that sort of stuff. So eventually I got completely fed up with this simply because campaigning wasn’t really my scene. I said well let’s go off and build our own route. The obvious route to build was along the riverside from Bristol and along the old railway to Bath. So in ’78 we produced our first document, Bristol to Bath along the river and the railway.That quite quickly transmogrified into building along the railway line. Avon at the time, we were a unitary authority, had bought the old railway line through Salford for a future bypass. So they owned the railway. They leased it to us for £1 a year. So we had eight kilometres of railway. I remember the planning application in that day was four sheets of A4 paper. One of the things was that we reckoned that the planners couldn’t possibly say no to a voluntary group.British Library catalogue number: C2037/37 Project clip number: 17