I am very happy to announce that today after being contacted by Haringey council earlier in the week iBikeRide was invited to a kick off session to help design and plan a dirt / BMX circuit in my local Lordship Recreation Ground

Some background, Londoners were recently invited by the Mayor to vote on a shortlist of parks across the capital in order to fund improvements to make them more attractive and safer for local communities. More than 110,000 people cast their vote and the winners were just recently announced. Lordship Recreation Ground was one of the recipients receiving £400,000 of Heritage Lottery funds. The money being allocated to the regeneration of the park.

As many of you will be familiar iBikeRide has been campaigning for a North London off road dirt park in urban areas to bring off road cycling to areas that would not normally benefit from it and in turn give the youth in the community access. Hence we were delighted to be invited to get involved in this Council initiative.

Lordship Recreation Ground is a mix of woodland and fields. It is in a district park in Tottenham, in the Borough of Haringey, North London. It is the largest green space in Tottenham, commanding great views across to Alexandra Palace. It is also crossed by one of London’s hidden rivers, the Moselle and has a large lake.

The meeting is in a couple of weeks and I will be meeting other biking bodies as well as the council and the architect of the new park. So there is time to gather some community input in advacne and get our thinking caps on.

The first task will be looking at the use today, the new environment available in situ and starting to develop design ideas of what to build. 

To me it is important to create an area that is exciting and diverse for the youth and also to ensure that it is built is in keeping with the woodland nature. It also needs to have elements and a feel that encourages new people to start as well as significant challenges to experienced riders. It be great to see a club formed and then competitive events as well as recreational elements catered for. Most core is to get those that will ride it involved and integrated into this process from day one and ensure they are part of what is designed, built and used. Hence in advance of the meeting I plan to head down there this weekend to talk to  the local riders to see what they would like to see.  Let me know if you would like to join and let me know if you have any park design skills or tips you would like to offer into the project.

To put this in context the BBC did an overview of what this means for the whole park here. It is pretty good.