The cousins Grimshaw: they have a vision

The man on the left has just been given the green light (and pounds 42. 5m) to set up a national cycle path network. The man on the right has long been held as one of our leading modern architects. They both share a crusading temperament - and a family name. Christian Wolmar and Jonathan Glancey talk to the cousins Grimshaw, inspired dreamers

John Grimshaw has been working on his dream for the past 15 years and last week it came true. His tiny organisation, Sustrans, has been given pounds 42.5m towards the cost of a 6,500- mile national cycle path network which should be completed by the year 2005.

In truth, the cycle network is a small part of Grimshaw's vision. He wants a lot more. He sees the bicycle as a civilising influence on our society, with a vital part in reducing the environmental damage from our 20th-century lifestyle: "What is wonderful about cycling is that virtually everyone can do it. If we can allow people to cycle, then they can all contribute to the environment. If people only take one extra journey a year by bike, then they are becoming part of the solution."

He says the network is a catalyst which will bring the British back to the bicycle they have almost forsaken: "In Denmark, which has a similar climate and topography, 20 per cent of journeys are made by bicycle, while in Britain it is 2.5 per cent. I see no reason why we can't achieve the Danish figure." He stresses that cycling was declining in Denmark, too, until the government realised how important it was for transport and for health.

But his vision is even wider. The cycle paths are not just bits of transport infrastructure but part of a much bigger project to reduce people's alienation from their environment. They are linear parks, giving people the chance to "reclaim their own local space". Wherever possible, sculptures are commissioned - over 100 sculptors have been used - for use as milestones. Local children are often invited to contribute to the work. "If you have a hundred children who have helped build a sculpture or painted a drawing on a bridge, then there are a hundred local kids who won't vandalise it because they feel part of it."

A big shambling man who looks a lot younger than his 50 years, Grimshaw is a civil engineer by trade. He worked for Taylor Woodrow, then went to Uganda for Voluntary Service Overseas: "I spent the time building roads," he says wryly. He returned to Bristol and went to work for a local civil engineering contractor for whom he helped build a multi-storey car park in Taunton, an irony he is quite happy to relate. He did try to subvert it. "I suggested that it should be clad in brightly coloured car bonnets to liven it up. They turned down the idea; I don't know why."

He became increasingly involved in community politics in Bristol and chalked up a number of successes. Indeed, there are already a few monuments to his persistence and tenaciousness,such as the dock cranes which stand near Bristol's town centre. The council had sold them off to a scrap merchant, but Grimshaw got wind of it. "I got 50 people to put in pounds 100 each and we rushed off to Newport with pounds 5,000 in cash to buy the cranes back off the scrappie. He was bewildered, but accepted the money. Then we told the council that we were the new owners and could we have a lease, please. The cranes are still there."

He was also involved in saving the ferry across the Avon. "They wanted to close the service, so we bought the ferry to keep it running. We were so successful that eventually we were able to sell it to a ferryman and now there are four boats running the service."

There is a slightly bemused air about him, as if he can't quite believe what is being done to the planet in the name of progress. But that does not mean he is out of touch. It was not luck that brought Sustrans its pounds 42.5m, but Grimshaw's acute awareness that it was the exactly the right thing to go for at the right time. There had been years when cycle paths were thought a ridiculous idea by the government, which considered cycling too dangerous for Britain's roads. Not any longer. Now ministers are happy to pose in banana helmets to support what they now see as a healthy activity which is cheap to promote.

Indeed, Grimshaw reckons the project caught the spirit of the millennium in a way no other applicant did, and he is right. There are countless bids for exhibition centres and museums but, as he puts it, "Ours was the only one that looks forward, that offers hope for people to live in a better way in the next century or millennium than in the last one." Indeed, with backing from everyone from Prince Charles to various Tory MPs, it was a surefire winner from the beginning and it was no surprise that Sustrans got more than it asked for.

Grimshaw hit upon the idea of cycle routes almost by accident, from his involvement in local campaigns. He heard of the abandoned Bath-to-Bristol railway and managed to persuade British Rail to sell it for pounds 1. "I've learnt that it's no good campaigning by just writing letters and the like. You've got to do things." And do it he did. He got together a team of volunteers who built the first five kilometres of pathway in three months. "We just put limestone dust down over the ballast and built a few access points. We had no idea that there would be so much demand, but people flocked on to it."

He persuaded the Department of Transport, then a deeply cycle-unfriendly organisation, to commission a survey of all abandoned railways that could be used as cycle paths. "We haven't lost a useful railway route since 1982 thanks to that survey. And many of those routes have been transformed into cycle paths."

He is not only Sustrans's director but its engineer. He personally supervises many of the small projects that have led to the creation of 300 miles of dedicated cycle path so far. As a result, he doesn't see much of his family - he has three children. The kids "are not particularly keen on bikes", presumably a healthy rebellious reaction, but they don't get ferried around because he refuses to own a car. He bicycles everywhere but finds it boring sometimes. He used to have a clip which enabled him to read books while he pedalled but was prosecuted by the police.

John Grimshaw has the traditional deference of the engineer to his architect cousin whom he says is "the famous one". But when the cycle network is completed and millions of people are riding along the paths, admiring the sculptures and enjoying the countryside, it will be as lasting a testimony to him as Waterloo International station and all those other hi-tech buildings are to his cousin Nicholas. CW "President Mitterand said art and culture are the foundation of our society. No politician in England would say that. Our concept of architectural value is retrospective. We tend to measure everything according to standards set down by the past." Nicholas Grimshaw, the architect of the much- praised Waterloo International Terminal, is a fierce opponent of Britain's cultural obsession with heritage and nostalgia. Even so, he has managed to build some of these island's most forward-looking building s without, it seems, being asked to look over his shoulders or even having to compromise. Waterloo, for example. Surely the International Terminal, gateway to the land of Art and Culture, is proof that we don't measure all new buildings according to standards set down by the past? "Waterloo station? I don't know," blinks Grimshaw behind Le Corbusier-style glasses, "I just don't know how we did it." At 55, Grimshaw is one of Britain's most successful architects. Over the past five years he has designed some of the most distincti ve buildings in and for Britain - the International Terminal at Waterloo (1994) and the British Pavilion at the Seville Expo (1992) chief among them. He has built two memorable buildings for the newspaper industry - the Financial Times printing press in London's Docklands (1988) and the Western Morning News headquarters in Plymouth (1992). Current projects include the Berlin Stock Exchange and Communications Centre. What these buildings have in common is the fact that each is unrepentantly modern. Structural scions of Mies van der Rohe, the Prussian father of the modern steel and glass building, each of Grimshaw's buildings is determinedly futuristic. If one can fin d any trace of nostalgia, it is a longing for the notion of inexorable progress, a concept that seems outmoded in an age where the eclectic values of vapid Post-Modernism hold sway. Grimshaw prefers to lose a job rather than compromise his Modern Movement values. He told World Architecture magazine that he is prepared to "risk everything" with every project he designs. "I mean that if they [clients] want bungalow-style buildings on a science park, or whatever, they can go to someone else. But it never comes to that. I always think that if I explain things well enough, people will not oppose me. They tend to consider what I have said and then go along with it." And if that sounds cockily confident, it is a truth borne out by the architect's career, and certainly since he set up his own practice in London in 1980. Grimshaw understands perfectly well why so many of us in Britain are still frightened of modern architecture (because so much that was built in the name of Modernism between 1945 and 1980 was so bloody awful), yet remains convinced that we would like the new if the new was good and exciting enough. His buildings are new in every sense. Waterloo International, the Western Morning News HQ and the Berlin Stock Exchange represent not just new structural forms, but new methods of communication, from computer-driven publishing to 300km/h international tr ains. At its best, architecture is very much concerned with the idea of communication: buildings communicate the values of any age. And Grimshaw's designs still speak of boldly going into the future. So Grimshaw makes energetic use of new materials and uses old materials, like glass, in new ways. The curving walls of the Western Morning News building, for example, are a showcase of how to use glass innovatively; the glass appears to be seamless,real ising a dream modern architects have cherished since soon after the First World War when Mies van der Rohe first designed a glass office tower, unbuildable at the time, but entirely realistic today. Looking at the bravura structure of the public ice-rink Grimshaw built in Oxford, one engineer said: "Nick seems to be delaying the point at which the load [of the structure] meets the ground just as long as it is possible." This desire is part of a long quest by Grimshaw and other modern architects to make buildings as light as possible, to touch the earth as gently as long-legged flies touch streams, or NASA spaceships have landed on the moon. Again, this is an optimistic vision of how we might live in the future, using the latest technology and design responsibly and in sound ecological ways. A mixture of modesty and confidence, charm and determination, Grimshaw remains the epitome of the modern architect. Into the mid-Nineties, he retains the mop of long, yellowish hair, the Le Corbusier specs, the streamlined vegetarian frame and dress-sens e peculiar to the rare species he represents. You would never mistake him for anything other than an architect and he is proud of that. And, like a modern architect should, he goes sailing, plays tennis and has a weekend home beside a nature sanctuary in Norfolk. His office is as computerised as it is possible to be; he runs a tight, hardwork-ing ship with precisely timetabled meetings and employs tough young architects who get things done pdq. Grimshaw is an enormously painstaking chap and yet determinedly outspoken. Passionate, too. And that is a rarity in a profession in which so many people play safe so as to be liked, win commissions and slip uncontroversial projects comfortably through th e planning process. Despite his outspokenness, Grimshaw gets to build the buildings he dreams of. "I suppose I'm quite good at putting conceptual arguments to people," he says. "I do it slowly, but forcefully, dogmatically even." It takes this kind of energy - what those wi th less imagination or heart would call stubbornness - to achieve buildings like the Western Morning News HQ and Waterloo International. "I still don't know how we did it, though," he says. JG