Victory Park Bike Pump Track Project, Cainscross Town Council, Glos

This project is to renew the bike pump track at Victory Park, Cainscross. The bike pump track is a circuit designed to be ridden using up and down body movements to generate momentum, which develops balance, co-ordination, and all terrain bike-handling skills.

Built in the 1980s with enthusiastic residents taking the lead on design, fundraising, and build, it is made of compacted earth track through grass. The track is now so worn and eroded that local teenagers use shovels to try and improve it themselves. Specialist track designers/builders will use type 1 stone covered by compacted earth and stone-dust. It will meet modern expectations, be safer, more robust, and easier to maintain.

There is a distinct lack of similar facilities in the wider area – so those that do exist attract users from all over Stroud and beyond. For example, bike dirt jumps in a village some miles away attract users from as far afield as Gloucester (30 minute drive), including many of the thirty or so teenagers local to Cainscross who still persevere in using the park track but who desperately want it to be renewed. They will no longer need to travel to use a better track and other local children and teenagers who will not use the track in its current state will now want to use it. Younger children will have a safe place to learn bike handling skills.

The support from Access Bike will mean that locals will have access to low-cost bikes and with the track being a free to use facility there will be few barriers to children taking up riding and making it part of their everyday lives. Tracks are also proven to develop communities around them where peer learning and peer support have enormous benefits to mental wellbeing and confidence as well as the riding itself improving physical fitness. The UK has mental health and obesity crises with young people, so spaces like this have the power to benefit an area in many ways – more pro-social behaviour, more confident children, and the means of reducing obesity levels and the associated life limiting illnesses associated with obesity.