Hayling Billy Trail partly restored!
Success!!!! Cycle Hayling has been campaigning for a smooth, all-weather surface for the Billy Trail since we started in 2010, and the northern section from the bridge to the Esso garage car park was finished in January 2025!. And it’s a beautiful natural, stone based surface, better than the tarmac alternative, and is now weatherproof, and accessible to all, from wheelchairs to baby buggies and even child scooters.
Cycle Hayling says this is wonderful news, not just for cyclists, but for walkers, the disabled, horse-riders and nature lovers. And as the only traffic-free cycle route off the island, it’s good for motorists too, by getting cyclists off our narrow, overloaded main road.
It was funded with a £600,000 grant from Active Travel England to Hampshire County Council, and ring-fenced for active travel (so it was never available for potholes or sea defences that people also want fixing).
Many people have asked why we didn’t start with the WORST bits? We were all disappointed, but the grant would have been clawed back if not complete within a year, and the worst bits have issues with sea defences, drainage, and many nature protections there, so would have taken longer.
That’s only 1.2 km out of a total of 4.5 km, so we still have nearly three quarters to do. But Hampshire and Havant Councils have jointly invested another £100,000 in a Feasibility Design for the rest of the Billy Trail, including a direct link to West Lane and perhaps the centre of the island. And it includes some protection from future erosion by the sea. But there’s no funding yet, although we believe the next phase has been applied for.
Our target for the whole Billy Trail
- Cater for everyone – cyclists, walkers, parents with child buggies, wheelchairs for the disabled, nature lovers and horse riders. Where there’s room, it should have a ‘country path’ alongside for walkers and horses.
- A natural-looking, all-weather, skid-resistant surface, like the Langstone end of the Billy Trail, less vulnerable to spray and muck, with a slight camber to help rain wash off mud and leaves.
- Recycled materials in the base layer, where possible.
- Long term maintenance along with the road network.
- Good links to the rest of the island
Victoria Rd West, next to the Esso garage
West Lane
A direct link to Mengham (see Haylink).
A key issue will be gaining support from all users of the Billy Trail, not just cyclists. Many people are concerned that e-bikes and e-scooters will go too fast and cause accidents, or that it will become too much like a road, or even that motor vehicles will be allowed (they won’t).
So it’s really important for all cyclists to demonstrate that we can share paths respectfully with walkers. I know cyclists in a hurry hate slowing down, but walkers loathe bikes whooshing past without warning too – so use your bell! But legal e-bikes cut the power at 15mph, which is about normal cycling speed. And slowing down isn’t so painful because e-bikes are much easier to get back up to speed.
Ideally we’d have separate paths for cycling and walking all the way along, but some of the edges are protected by law for nature – which we all support – and making it wider would make it look too much like a road. But traffic volumes are low, so we think 3 metres is wide enough, especially where’s there’s room for the ‘country path’ alongside. And it’s over double it’s old railway width of 4 foot 8 and a half inches!
Many of the new cyclists we hope it will attract will be lone commuters, riding in single file, so they won’t need as much space as a leisure group who spread across the path. We’d like some sort of gentle segregation by signs or surface markings to ’nudge’ walkers and cyclists to their own side. We’d suggest walkers on the sea side, cyclists on the inland side.
A bit of Billy Trail History
It was the old Puffing Billy railway for over 100 years, then transformed in the 1980’s, following a campaign by a group of local cyclists inspired by Sustrans. But 40 years later, the surface has deteriorated badly, and sections of the trail have collapsed into the sea, which are very difficult to repair with such strong nature protections. Part of the northern section got a red self-binding gravel surface a few years back, which was better, but not perfect.
It’s always been a transport link – it’s first century as The Puffing Billy railway line, from 1867 until the Beeching cuts in 1963. It then languished for 20 years, almost unusable, until 1984, when a group of Havant cyclists persuaded John Grimshaw (later to found Sustrans) to come up with a design to transform it, which they used to lobby Havant and Hampshire Councils. And it later became a core part of the Sustrans National Cycle Network as NCN2.
But it’s gone mostly downhill since then, with very little maintenance, rough surfaces, mud, floods and persistent erosion from the sea.
Please write to Alan Mak today, asking him to reverse the Active Travel cuts and get us the funding to protect the Billy Trail for the next 30 or 40 years.
If you want to support our efforts, please register your support; registration is free and we will keep you up-to-date with progress.