Bridgwater Active Travel Wayfinding

Client Somerset County Council
Location Bridgwater, UK
Years 2020 – 2022
Services Wayfinding Strategy, Cartography, Information Design, Signage Design and Consultation & stakeholder Engagement

Bridgwater is a historic market town in Somerset. Historically, it was the leading industrial town in Somerset with a manufacturing centre for clay tiles and bricks, a museum now marks the former site. It hosts an annual carnival which attracts around 150,000 visitors from across the region and beyond. How can this help encourage active travel?

Currently, the walking and cycling infrastructure provision in Bridgwater is limited. There are inconsistent elements of pedestrian route signage, and the cycling infrastructure is mostly restricted to routes defined by TSRGD cycle signs. This means that the active travel network is not joined up, and there are key destinations and linkages such as connecting the rail station to the town centre which are not clearly marked.

Our role was to establish a consistent system of signing for the walking and cycling network, supporting existing users to navigate their way through the town, and advertising the network potential new users. Our vision was to make the active travel network as simple and intuitive to navigate as the roads are for people driving, which has long had its own recognisable and consistent system of signage. The system needed to be unique to the place and present an identity that was reflective of community, culture, and history.

The primary outcome of this work was a Wayfinding Strategy which describes a system and a set of standard designs to make the walking and cycling network instantly recognisable and reliably connected using a combination of physical products, a unique system identity and a set of coherent information tools. It also provides good practice advice and guidelines that can be used by surrounding towns.