Two green Sustrans flags displayed on a bicycle handlebars at the opening of the Bath Two Tunnels Greenway on 6th April 2013 in Somerset, United Kingdom. A large number of cyclists and pedestrians attended the event to celebrate the restored railway tunnels which link 13-miles through the beautiful country-side. The restoration of the tunnels was organised by Sustrans, working in partnership with Bath and North East Somerset Council. Sustrans is a charity that works with communities, policy- (Photo by Andrew Aitchison/In Pictures Ltd./Corbis via Getty Images)
Corbis via Getty Images
British sustainable transport charity Sustrans has been renamed as the Walk Wheel Cycle Trust. The name change has yet to take effect on the charity’s website.
Sustrans sprang from a local bicycle route lobby group in 1977 and created the National Cycle Network 30 years ago this year. The name change was decided at a general meeting of the company staged in Birmingham on 4 July, according to an official filing.
“The Company shall hereby adopt the name ‘Walk Wheel Cycle Trust’ in substitution for “Sustrans,” said the filing.
A cyclist passes Bristol and Bath direction arrows on the Bristol & Bath railway path.. (Photo by Ben Birchall/PA Images via Getty Images)
PA Images via Getty Images
An early version of Sustrans started in July 1977 when a group of Bristol-based environmental campaigners formed Cyclebag, a cycling advocacy group that would put these ideas into action. Cyclebag—an acronym for Conserve Your Calf and Leg Energy Bristol Action Group—would later transform into Sustrans. The group’s founders included civil engineer John Grimshaw (who would become CEO of Sustrans and who would create the National Cycle Network concept); journalist Alistair Sawday (who would go on to create a travel-guide empire and sustainable-holiday company); cinematographer David Sproxton (co-creator of the Oscar-winning studio Aardman Animations, maker of Wallace and Gromit); and architect George Ferguson (who, in 2012, became the first elected mayor of Bristol).
“Cyclebag emerged as a constructive protest against the domination of the motor lobby in our politics and our roads,” stated Ferguson.
In 1979, the campaign group—led by Grimshaw—leased a stretch of the former Midland Railway and, with volunteer labor (including Grimshaw’s own), created a five mile cycling and walking trail between Bath and Bitton; it was later extended to became the station-to-station Bristol-to-Bath trail. This was not the first rail trail in the UK—the Manifold Railway Path in the Peak District of northern England was created in the 1930s—but it was the springboard from which Sustrans, founded in 1983, pushed for the formation of the ambitious National Cycle Network.
Sustrans was short for sustainable transport.
