"Manifesting diversity": behind the Better Bikes Social festival

The "BETTER BIKE SOCIAL" festival of bikes is one of those seeds of an idea you have which catch you off-guard and you can’t rid yourself of. Being the victim of many bike related crimes over a year or so, I have been increasingly drawn to the fixie culture of self-build brakeless bikes, hacking track-frame-tech with retro parts, resulting in bespoke set ups and a unique optic on what a bike should look and ride like..a sort of cathartic means to rekindle the love of the bike.

This process opened a door into another world, far beyond my own comprehension of the cycling community. And the ethos of the festival is rooted in manifesting this diversity; we have bike builders, artists, designers, policy makers, public figures, charities and so forth all contributing to the series, freely, and passionately...a demonstration of the power of the bike if ever this was needed.  

For the opening event of the first day of the festival, we were joined by Sarah Featherstone and Judith Sykes (of Featherstone Young and Expedition Engineering respectively) who are part of a wider group of amazing and talented thinkers/strategists/designers called Velocity (including Annalie Riches, Jennifer Ross, Kay Hughes and Petra Marko). This group met in 2016 through #PedELLE (charity cycling endurance event open to female riders working in the property industry), who jointly went on to combine their cross-disciplinary expertise to develop the winning strategy for the National Infrastructure Commission’s ideas competition for the Oxford to Cambridge growth corridor. Their presentation covered the winning competition submission, which demonstrated how to prioritise pedestrian and cycle movements, simultaneously daisy-chaining existing isolated communities. The benefits of the strategy ten-fold, each move, having a knock-on effect in the total to create a profoundly positive new experience at street level, for connections, permeability, economics, safety and community cohesion. 

Following, we had the pleasure of Nick Hanmer's talk about the Club Peloton phenomenon, itself the parent organisation of the PedELLE ride, mentioned above. Nick showed us how their industry rides provide multiple life changing opportunities to both the riders (as demonstrated above) and the charities the rides and the organisation supports (Coram, Cyclists Fighting Cancer, Multiple System Atrophy Trust, and the Tom Ap Rhy Price Memorial Trust). With over 2,000 active members in the Club Peloton family, it plays an extremely important role in connecting people and as the name suggests, we all move to the rhythm of the slowest rider, an important message perhaps for how the streets in our cities might better work. It also has the ambition to break the £5M target this year in the total sum of donations the organisation has made in the 15 or so years it has been active.

Finally, John Nordon brought proceedings to a close with his 'Twenty Inch' project; an exercise in adaptation and transformation of a humble much overlooked bicycle typology, the Raleigh 'Twenty' or 'Shopper', the ubiquitous small wheeled bicycle (hence its name) built in the many thousands between the mid 1980's and late 1990's. John's insight was fascinating, grappling with notions of re-use, re-appropriation, the circular economy, scale, and affordability. The BETTER BIKE SOCIAL is also exhibiting six of John's mini projects and he himself arrived on one of his Mini-Bike projects, this one carrying a whopping 40 litres of storage space on its diminutive frame.

The overarching message from these three presentations, being the potential value that can be extracted from the existing condition, Velocity transforming existing dislocated rural communities, Club Peloton building upon existing professional networks to transform the lives of those in need, and John leaning into the very real problem of the accumulated waste of mass-produced bicycles, and finding ways to kick-start a new lease of life through his process of radical transformation.

The programme continues throughout the week, ending Sunday 4th February 5pm. Check the Velocity calendar and the Better Bike Social website for more. Tickets are free of charge and available here. 

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