There is a little patch of grass at the end of our street. It sits between the end of our road and Coopies Lane which runs past the train station and up to the industrial estate. It’s a bit no no-man’s land that was actually at the end of the old Blyth and Tyne railway line but that is for another day.
It’s a piece of grass, a handkerchief of land that has no real value, you can’t build on it and there used to be a gate into what was the coal yard close by.
Give them their due, the Council has tried to make it look nice though, after all Morpeth is a nice town. They tidied it up, re-seeded the grass and put some small wooden posts around the edge, every half meter or so to mark the edge. They refreshed the tarmac on the pavement that went round the small patch of green and followed the edge of the road.
But this is on the main path down into the town from Stobhill and a way to the railway station and if you cross the estate road you have to turn left when you get back on the path to circumnavigate the little patch of grass. Now people are people and this was too much effort. After a couple of days a thin brown line of earth appeared where people had walked straight across the grass. Within a matter of weeks it was a path. The good folk of Morpeth had voted with their feet and cut an alternative route paying no heed whatsoever to the efforts of the highways department or the now decorative and useless wooden posts.
The Council have done some more work now to widen the junction and open up the aspect. The coal yard has gone and new street lights have been erected. As for the little patch of grass, they have tidied it up, re-seeded the grass and removed the small wooden posts. What about the path? No more circumnavigation, it’s as straight as a die in exactly the spot that the pedestrians had indicated it should be.
And the moral of this little tale is that if you set out to design something that you expect people to use, get them to try it out first and redesign it until it fits the natural flow of what people do.
Thoughts from a Guerrilla Worker 