The Bristol Bike Project came into being in December of 2008 after project founders James Lucas and Colin Fan were inspired to set up a charitable bike project while cycling their way through Scandanavia. The idea is simple. We take in unwanted bicycles from the general public and go about fixing them up with the help of our service-users who require a bicycle. They then get to take their bicycle away with a quality lock and set of lights.
We started the project intially to work with Refugees & Asylum-Seekers alongside Bristol Refugee Rights and continue to work closely with them. We now also work with an ever-growing cross-section of underprivileged and marginalised groups
in Bristol, including those within the mental health sector,
the homeless, recovering substance-abusers, and detached
youth groups.
We originally started this project in our back garden and then from an old horse stable before moving into a workshop space in Hamilton House in the Artists' Quarter of Stokes Croft, Bristol. We are currently operating the project entirely voluntarily and work every Wednesday and Thursday.
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The emphasis of the project is very much upon skill-sharing and really encouraging people to get stuck in and to learn new skills. We hope that by doing this, people will become more knowledgeable as to how their bicycle works and more confident about working on it independently, that they will develop a greater sense of their own ability and that they will also be able to share newly-learned skills with their peers.
We recycle as much as we can and do our best to prevent as much as possible from going to landfill. When bikes are beyond repair, we strip them of their useful components and either pass the frame onto our friends at Spoke n'Chain or use parts ourselves for bike-trailer building. All of our unusable tyres, inner tubes and chains go to Re-Collect, who make fantastic recycled fashion items out of them.
We truly want this to be a sustainable project with the emphasis being upon 'helping people help themselves' and by doing so, we hope that the people that receive a bicycle from us will get the opportunity to experience the vitalization and great sense of freedom and personal awareness that riding a bike can bring.
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