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New College Leicester (Licensed CC BY-SA 3.0 John Welford)Construction starts on new £750k Leicester road cycle track
Work has started on a new £750,000 purpose-built road cycling track in Leicester, which could open as early as April.
The 1km long outdoor track, to be named Leicester Cycle Circuit, is being built on land at New College Leicester, funded by British Cycling (BC), New College Leicester, and Leicester City Council.
The closed road facility will be floodlit and fenced, and will provide a traffic-free space for recreational, training and competitive use. Construction will take approximately four months.
British Cycling’s director of coaching, education and development, John Mills, said: “Our aim is to create a network of traffic-free cycling facilities across the country, allowing people of all ages and abilities to build their cycling skills and confidence. The Leicester Cycle Circuit will allow the people of the city to do just that, and we look forward to seeing local people taking up this opportunity when the circuit is operational.”
The track is one of three cycle facilities into which British Cycling announced last year it would invest a total of £900,000. Hull will receive funding from BC, Hull City Council and Hull Culture and Leisure Trust for a new closed road track, while Reading’s Palmer Park Velodrome is being refurbished, with funds from BC and Reading Borough Council.
Cllr Adam Clarke, assistant city mayor for energy and sustainability at Leicester City Council, said the facility will be available to all ages and backgrounds, from children and young people to adults. The track will also become home to a local Wheels For All project, part of a national programme which encourages people with disabilities to try out specially adapted bikes.
“We’re very pleased to be working in partnership with British Cycling and New College Leicester and to invest in this exciting project,” said Clarke. “Cycling is vital to addressing Leicester's health and transportation challenges as well as being a sport that produces inspirational Olympic stars. By providing the perfect place to practise traffic-free, people will be able to develop new skills and confidence whilst enjoying this state of the art facility."
Wayne Allsopp, business development manager at New College Leicester, said: “This will be a great facility for the city and a fantastic addition to our sports village. We already have more than 2,500 regular community sport users and we hope that the cycle circuit will bring even more people to our outstanding facilities.
“We’re very committed to sports development and are dedicated to placing the college at the heart of our local community and at the heart of the city’s sporting landscape.”
Laura Laker is a freelance journalist with more than a decade’s experience covering cycling, walking and wheeling (and other means of transport). Beginning her career with road.cc, Laura has also written for national and specialist titles of all stripes. One part of the popular Streets Ahead podcast, she sometimes appears as a talking head on TV and radio, and in real life at conferences and festivals. She is also the author of Potholes and Pavements: a Bumpy Ride on Britain’s National Cycle Network.
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11 comments
It is of course a sports facility first but it all helps!
What a brilliant facility for clubs to do 'Go Ride' training of kids who then become confident and then ride in the wider world when they are a bit older.
Plus you'd be surprised how many people will start out wanting to restart riding a bike on such a facility.
I hope we can persuade 'em to build just such a thing near my home town...
I hope the cycle routes to get there are adequate.
Palmer park is more about sport than recreation.
The people 'we' want? Who elected you spokesperson for the millions of bike owners in the country? By your rationale, any money spent on cycling should only be spent if it has a proven benefit to the largest number of people possible. If that were the case, you'd never spend any money anywhere because nobody would agree on where it would be 'best' spent.
So because it doesn't fit YOUR idea of what should be done, that makes it 'a waste of money'? I'll never use it, as I don't live anywhere near Leicester, but I think the racing cyclists within a 50 mile radius will enjoy using it - especially budding racers, being able to ride crits on a purpose built, traffic free track is certainly preferable to smashing round an industrial estate.
I think the two of you are arguing at cross-purposes. Surely the problem is more with the quote in the article? To whit -
“Cycling is vital to addressing Leicester's health and transportation challenges as well as being a sport that produces inspirational Olympic stars. By providing the perfect place to practise traffic-free, people will be able to develop new skills and confidence whilst enjoying this state of the art facility."
This seems to be introducing a bit of deliberate confusion over what the purpose of this is. Funding sporting activities is perfectly valid in itself, but it doesn't help anyone to mix-up sport and cycling-for-health-and-transportation.
What on earth does a sporting facility have to do with 'energy and sustainability'? Why is this council officer commenting on it at all? Maybe its just a bit of internal council politics, and he's looking for a pretext to claim credit for it?
I think the implication is that it can be used by people to dust off their bikes and bike riding, in addition to its obvious sporting purpose.
Presumably the thinking runs that if people have somewhere safe to wobble about, they might eventually make some of their road journeys by bike.
I don't live in Leicester or Hull but even I can see it will be a great facility.
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It will be good to have another closed track on the eastern side of the Midlands. My lad races closed circuits in the Midlands and we are either heading to Stourport, Shrewsbury or the track in Solihull which is in an open park and hard to manage. Another local(ish) option is good news.
I agree with Cygnus. There's a closed road circuit at Harvey Haddon sports centre in Nottingham and it's great, although I don't think it's floodlit. More fun to race on than a big motorsport circuit and I can see the benefits for training both kids and adults on such tracks.
Cygnus just beat me to it. I think there's a good case to be made for both. A closed circuit track for cycling as a sport has nothing to do with transport infrastructure.
@Python, I understand your frustration at crap infrastructure particularly around the new dual carriageway in Hull that you mention, but WTF does that have to do with a sport's governing body investing in regional sports facilities in Leicester (okay, Reading and Hull as well)?
We need both good infrastructure for cycling as a means of transport, and facilities like this where the grass roots of cycling as a sport can be nurtured