One Mile Walks is a new national programme which will be launched later in 2024, all about going outdoors, getting moving and enjoying walking. In order to reach its potential One Mile Walks seeks to collaborate with national and local organisations to identify great One Mile Walks and develop new approaches to accessible walk development.
The Programme
The programme has two overarching aims:
1. To promote walks of about one mile:
- To get more people out walking,
- To provide benefits associated with walking and being outside.
2. To innovate approaches for accessible walking:
- To encourage greater collaboration between walking and outdoors organisations,
- To create a shared walking programme which can be used as a test bed for new approaches to accessibility, engagement, language, imagery and information.
Why combine these two aims?
Using One Mile Walks as a focus for collaboration and innovation will be effective because:
- Whilst many organisations have published walking routes that are about one mile long, few organisations are promoting them to any significant degree. Working together we can promote large numbers of walks to the target audiences.
- A programme dedicated to a specific, currently untapped and currently unowned walking genre should not detract from any organisation’s current core walking programmes.
- A bounded programme will provide an isolated test bed for innovation which will not require organisations to initially adjust their core programmes and resources to test effectiveness – enabling the evaluation of the innovation.
- Once new approaches have been developed these could be applied across a wider range of walking routes and approaches.
See more One Mile Walks articles
Example Walk – Bradford Dale from YHA Youlgreave
There are many one mile walks already available and we want to bring these together in one place so they can be searched and promoted widely to the target audience, giving them a choice of One Mile Walks across the UK. This example is from the YHA Festival of Walking. It begins in beautiful Youlgreave and heads down to the stream through Bradford Dale – past the open swimming pool – and back up to the village. A steep, but stunning one-mile route.
One Mile Walks will be better with collaboration. Get in touch to share your thoughts and get involved: matt@walkingpace.uk
