We recently received a kind donation from Emily & Chris who cycled from John O’Groats to Land’s End and decided to raise money for the project in the process.

“The idea came about as a bit of a joke originally and everybody, including bike shop staff and our supportive parents thought we probably wouldn’t make it”, says Emily, “We met some of the most amazing people- the Laird of the Loch (a guy that lives in a boat on Holy Loch), a retired couple that overtook us on mountain bikes then fed us green tea, cherries and popcorn, the friendliest Dutch couple imaginable and some crazy folk in Bristol who led us to the discovery of the most incredible falafel takeaway place! It rained 28 out of 30 days and we cycled 1125 miles on bikes that have the combined age of 100”.

“My friends kept telling me that I should raise some sponsorship money for it but I couldn’t think of a charity that particularly stood out and then I heard about The Bristol Bike Project and was reminded by an article I saw in the Guardian newspaper. Basically, I think what they do is great and if I didn’t live about 200 miles away I’d go down and get my hands covered in bike grease helping out! So Instead, I thought about doing the ride to raise money for the bike project”.

A HUGE thank you to Emily & Chris for their kind donation – it really does make a difference and allows us to continue doing the work that we are.

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This is the first in what we hope to be a series of short 4 minute films about some of the people we work with at The Bristol Bike Project. This first film features Sean from Bristol Drugs Project who we worked with recently and who was happy to talk to us about how having a bicycle has helped him in his everyday life. We hope you enjoy it.

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Posted by
The Bristol Bike project

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Following on from the two-week cycling event, A Beautiful Machine, up at the Howies store in Bristol recently, at which James was invited to speak about the project and what we get up to here, we are pleased to say that our group project bike build is up at the store and is being auctioned off to raise money for the project along with a bunch of other bike goodies kindly donated by Charge, Hope Technology, Brooks of England, Rapha and The Ride Magazine.

Colin proudly displaying the bike that he and others put so much work into.

The bike was given to the project about 4 months ago and was originally a lime-green peugeot racer in a pretty bad conditon. The first thing we did was to strip it down and wire brush it (with an angle grinder) back to bare metal. It then had 5 coats of clear spray lacquer before being built back up into a single-speed with reclaimed parts here at the workshop. We very much look forward to seeing it blitzing its way around the streets of Bristol soon!

To make a bid for the bike or any other of the bike bits in the auction please visit the Beautiful Machine blog where you can see what’s up for grabs and find out how to make a bid. A huge thanks again to Nick Hand and John McFaul for inviting us to be a part of this event.

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Louis (pictured), a volunteer at Foodcycle, has also been lending a hand at the bike project for a while now and 2 weeks ago refurbished a donated bicycle to be used by Foodcycle in Bristol for transporting meals with the use of a bike trailer.

For more information about the Foodworks project and how to get involved please take a look at their website: www.foodworksuk.org

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We are very happy to have started several youth programs here at the project, working for Challenge and Support, a largely preventive, early interventions pilot project supporting young people involved in recorded anti-social behaviour and/or low level offending. The focus is to positively affect young peoples’ behaviour, attitudes and levels of engagement.

We are currently running comprehensive 6-week courses for five young lads, covering most aspects of bike-building and maintenance, at the end of which they will get to take away a bike that they have put together themselves. The lads have already been responding well to the workshop environment and have been enjoying getting their hands dirty taking several broken bikes apart in order to learn how to build a bike from scratch. We are keen to continue with these youth programs – if you would like further info, please get in touch!

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Thomas, Gezae, Adam & Colin work on Thomas’ bicycle.

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We have just received some of these wonderful t-shirts inspired by the project, designed by Nick Hand.

Nick commented, “I was asked by my mates at the howies shop in Bristol to design a T shirt for the Better by Bike project. A few other designers and illustrators were asked as well. My preference was to help a really good, specific project and maybe funnel some cash from the Ts that way too. I took my camera down to the project and spent an hour or so just photographing bike bits – it seemed to make sense to do something which summed up the project visually. Every now and then you come across great people doing great things, and your instinct is to get involved. The Bristol Bike Project is just that”.

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We have just heard from the director, that it has been selected for the Oneworld Documentary Festival in Prague, which bills itself as the largest human rights film festival in europe, from the 3rd to the 10th march. www.oneworld.cz It is a very multinational festival and usually only accepts a small handful of films from the uk (as in two or three) and goes on to be distributed around 30 odd czech towns and goes to a whole load of schools and universities.

It has also just been accepted for this year’s Unchosen Bristol Film Festival in November 2010. So we are all really pleased to hear this news and really hope that the film will help to spread some awareness about what it means to be an asylum-seeker in this country, as well as encouraging more people to bring their unwanted bicycles to us!

There will also be a link to the film from our website some time in March – we will keep you posted…

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Calais, a French coastal town, is a border between France and Britain. Last year it was “home” to over a thousand migrants waiting to travel to the UK. Now, due to increasingly repressive measures taken by the French state (and endorsed by the UK government), numbers have dropped to around 350 resident migrants at any one time. Most are forced to live in make shift tents or abandoned buildings; these are routinely destroyed by riot police.

Bikes are an essential tool in Calais and are used by No Borders activists as quick, cheap and efficient transport to enable them to monitor police activity in different migrant areas; the bikes will also form a bike library for migrants. For more info about No Borders and the situation in Calais, check out: www.calaismigrantsolidarity.wordpress.com

Bicycology is a cyclists’ collective that offers a range of activities to promote cycling and make the links with wider issues of environmental and social responsibility. A passion for cycling is used to pursue a vision of a just and sustainable world through a combination of education, entertainment and creative direct action. For more info see: www.bicycology.org.uk