The democracy of desire

Every city, town and village has its own footprint shape, created as a result of  encroachment onto the undeveloped land around it.  You'll know what I mean as new housing on the edge avoids a river, old quarries, an outlier hill or protected green belt land. The boundary is irregular,  but the shape of the settlement is unmistakable to those who live there.

There is another unique footprint: the pattern of roads which enable us to get around (or pass through) our home town.  These veins, as a complete network, form unique patterns.  For the most part we don't need to know the names of those roads; the pattern they form is sufficient to identify where we are, or to pick out our town from any other.

There are road patterns, often associated with new towns or development towns, which have been largely designed into their place; superimposed on the landscape.  In many places, however, the road patterns, especially close to the town centre, appear disorganised, and it often seems impossible to tidy the pattern without the democratic opinion of residents getting in the way.  The great fire of London in 1666 did produce a grand opportunity to do just that – to start again.  Several plans were submitted in the years following the fire, all of which came to nothing, largely because there was no equivalent of compulsory purchase and land owners had no intention of giving up their precious plots for no compensation, just for a better road.  So today's City roads are not so very different from those before the fire, 350 years ago.

Footpath crosses a field near Smallford.

Former field footpath retained near Kingshill,
Marshalswick.

Now, let's move from the town streets to an ornamental park, or woodland, or even expansive open grassland.  The precursors to the town's muddled streets are here too.  Finger signs point us to footpaths, byways, bridleways and tracks, most of which have been worn through time to link settlements or individual dwellings.  While a proportion of them follow field hedges or lines otherwise fenced off, many ignore these boundaries, and some of the easier topography too.  Narrow routes have been democratically worn into the landscape over centuries and have now been accepted as a permanent part of the Ordnance Survey map.  Even where towns have spread and enveloped the muddied lines, they have been protected in the new developments as alleys (in some parts of the country known as ginnels, snickets or twittens).  They can't be obliterated or altered except through a very public legal process.

Aerial map reveals a network of paths across the former Butterwick Farm,
including a circular pathway around the willows and pond.

The most democratic of all these desire lines are worn by pairs of feet whose owners decide they will take the route they perceive to be the easiest, rather than the path that is intended they should use.  A community football pitch may, over time, also reveal where walkers between matches have crossed the field diagonally to reach a facility, or another route, on the other side.  Open parks with designed elements – mown grassed areas intersected with grids of prepared paths – will always show public use very differently as grass is worn along diagonals.  Angled paths nicely surfaced with red or green macadam are routinely ignored as grass, or even flower-bed corners, are worn with irregular use.  A short path of trodden soil or flattened grass reveals where casual users really wanted their path.

These tramplings are the most democratically created of all routes, where, as long as people are not trespassing or causing criminal damage, they decide their preferred route.  The decision made by that first pair of feet, is added to over time as yet another desire line across the landscape is forged.  Some will be short lived, but others may be reinforced over time, their status enhanced.  One day they may become a meandering city street and future generations may wonder why the road was not created straight!