Symposium in London this Friday explores how Danish cycling experience can translate to UK

A free symposium taking place in London this Friday will explore how the Danes have managed to encourage cycling over the past four decades and what lessons from Copenhagen can be applied to London to ensure that more journeys are made by bike.

The symposium, which takes place at the Covent Garden premises of New London Architecture, brings together speakers including Ben Plowden, director of surface transport at Transport for London, and his counterpart in Copenhagen, Niels Tørsløv, director of traffic for the Danish capital’s council.

Mark Ames of the I Bike London blog will be among those hosting workshops as part of the event, which is called Living Suburbs - Getting to Copenhagen and is organised by the London Borough of Ealing in partnership with urban design and sustainability experts URBED and the TEN Group of senior local government officers in London.

The event’s page on the NLA website makes the observation that “Britain has long been the land of the railway and the car, with a deeply entrenched attitude that cycling is for either the poor or the fanatically fit,” before asking, “How much more liveable would London’s suburbs be if cycling were mainstream, as it is in Scandinavia and the Netherlands?

“A series of speakers, including Danish representatives, will share their experience with practitioners and policy makers in London and a number of workshops will compare approaches, and agree what action needs to be taken.”

Sponsors of the event include the Danish Embassy to the UK, and while attendance is free, registration is required, which you can do by following this link.

Recently, cycling experts from the Netherlands held a series of Love Cycling, Go Dutch conferences in the UK, visiting Bristol, Glasgow, London and Manchester to outline how urban planners there managed to achieve spectacular growth in cycling from the 1970s onwards, and how the Dutch experience could be translate to the UK. A report on the Manchester session is on the British Cycling website.

Living Suburbs: Getting to Copenhagen
NLA, The Building Centre, 26 Store Street, London WC!E 7BT

Friday 30 November, 0900-1300, registration open from 0830