Cycling in Nottingham: Bikeworks

Image: Christopher Paul Bradshaw
 

You know the type. Purposeless suspension under the seat, colour schemes as ugly as the frame geometry, usually cheap, sold by the zillion. But, while they may be popular, Tom agrees that they’re horrible, and misleading as bicycles, so he refuses to resell the full-sus types donated to his community bike recycling project, Bikeworks.

But such machines, he stresses, are the only exceptions to the rule since so many of Bikeworks’ activities revolve around the recycling of donated bicycles. In an average week, around fifty unwanted bikes come into the Bikeworks workshops in Ayr Street, off Forest Road East, from members of the public as well as police passing on stolen bikes they can’t reunite with their owners. Around half the bikes are fixed up and resold at a low price; the rest (including all the full-sus bikes) are stripped for parts, used in repair and maintenance projects, or scrapped.

The sales keep Bikeworks afloat and help to fund its community activities – maintenance sessions, community bike workshops and the recent CTC Big Bike Revival at Wollaton Park and the Forest Rec. Events like these have been at the heart of Barber’s vision since Bikeworks opened for business last autumn: that it should be the place in Nottingham to learn how to mend and maintain your bike at a small cost. The result should be more people cycling, and fewer bikes ending up at the scrapyard.

There is a benefit to the environment, to society and to individuals gaining the skills and knowledge to repair something mechanical. “I don’t want to sound holy about recycling, but the vast majority of bikes end up as scrap and it’s hideously wasteful – most of them are restorable to full function,” says Barber. “It’s also personally empowering if you can learn how to repair them. We live in a disposable age and we cannot afford this as a society because there is only one way that all this can end. We cannot go on endlessly consuming. We need to learn how to repair and reuse bikes – why spend £800 on a new bike?”

This latter point is germane to how Bikeworks fits into Nottingham’s overall bike market. While it is a community interest company, and is required to reinvest its profits back into the business, a commercial bike shop owner could argue that Bikeworks offers unfair competition. After all, it depends on fixing up and selling on old bikes that are donated for free. Nobody who brings an old bike to Bikeworks gets paid for it.

On the other hand, anyone who does the same in a commercial bikeshop expects to walk away slightly better off. Barber counters this by pointing out that Bikeworks pay commercial business rates like any other business; it is not grant-funded; it is not in competition with retail bike shops since it does not sell new bikes; the ones it sells average at £50-£80; and that, in his opinion, the Nottingham bike economy has grown so big that there is room for Bikeworks’ community niche amid the retail bike shops.

“It’s an increasingly expanding market,” says Barber. “There are some points where you could say our activities are competing, but there’s a massive market out there. Over the last two or three years, there’s been a huge increase in the number of cyclists in Nottingham. We are helping to build the cycling community. Many don’t want to mend their own bikes because they haven’t got the time or interest, so there will always be people who pay others. But there are a lot of people, particularly those on low incomes, who will benefit from learning how to fix a bike.”

While Barber himself has always been interested in cycling, and has a lifelong interest in environmental issues (he is a Green Party member), Bikeworks is just the latest move in a decidedly varied employment history. He began by training for five years as a doctor in Nottingham and then spent nearly two years in psychiatry. When he finally realised that medicine wasn’t for him, he moved into building, gardening and landscaping. He’s also worked as a local authority ecology officer, gardening journalist, gardening TV presenter on Channel 4’s nineties Garden Party programme, children’s picture book writer (Open Wide! and A Tale of Two Goats), sandwich maker (“I worked in a cob shop and as a vegetarian spent two years making ham cobs for the building trade”) and secondary school librarian.

The professional interest in cycling began when he worked as an instructor at Ridewide and grew the ambition to open a community bike business. Nine months after opening Bikeworks, he earns an hourly wage and has one part-time employee but still relies on volunteers to provide its core activities such as the bike refurbishment and sales, Dr Bike community repair and maintenance sessions (contracted by Sustrans) as well as in-house courses.

They also currently offer a Bike Kitchen membership scheme whereby you pay a small annual fee to use its workshops and tools. Barber also has ambitions to extend Bikeworks’ services to a range of marginalised communities such as refugees, people on low incomes and young people who are excluded from school or estranged from the educational process. In this sense, Bikeworks would offer a service like Wheelbase in Sneinton used to, but using bikes, not cars.

“There are huge numbers of excluded kids,” says Barber. “Most of them are not bad kids, they just can’t cope with the school system, and that is the failure of the system, not the kids. The system is rigid, pressured, results- and curriculum-driven and kids who don’t fit into these channels tend to get labelled as trouble-makers or failures. They are just kids who need something different. So, we are looking at running accredited courses, probably City & Guilds, in bike maintenance. But it would also be about how to work as a team, how to turn up on time, how to solve problems, how to tidy up after yourself. Bike maintenance is a flexible tool to engage different people in different ways. Most kids can relate to bikes. Most kids like cycling. And mostly, it’s a pleasurable activity and it’s a good package to bring to schools.”

If Barber sounds passionate on this issue, it’s because he has personal experience of it; he took his youngest son, one of three, out of school for eighteen months and homeschooled him. As Barber remarks, “The education system is incredibly rigid and alternatives are desperately needed. Some kids come out of it and their overwhelming feeling is one of failure and that is a shit place to start your life.”

Meanwhile, Barber has been reaching out to Raleigh in Eastwood in the hope that the company may see marketing benefits in rekindling a Nottingham presence in partnership with Bikeworks. Bikeworks is, after all, a mere stone’s throw from Raleigh’s first premises in Raleigh Street and Russell Street. So far, the relationship has yielded a full set of pro tools for use in Bikework’s community workshop. “We’ve been talking to their marketing people about a launch event for our workshop,” says Barber. “Maybe it could also be about Raleigh re-evaluating their historic links with Nottingham. It would be a shame to lose it, especially as we are fifty yards from their first property.”

Bikeworks, Unit 1-3 Ayr Street Workshops, Ayr Street, NG7 4FX. 0115 979 2433