Bamboo Bicycle Club at London Design Festival: Join Our Unique Bamboo Workshop
We’re thrilled to announce that Bamboo Bicycle Club will be participating in this year’s London Design Festival, a prestigious event that celebrates the city’s status as a global design capital. This festival, launched in 2003 by Sir John Sorrell CBE and Ben Evans CBE, has become a key moment on the cultural calendar, attracting designers, innovators, and creative minds from around the world.
As part of the festival, we’re offering a unique Introduction to Bamboo Workshop. This hands-on session is designed to showcase the incredible potential of bamboo as a sustainable material in design and manufacturing. Participants will get the chance to work with bamboo, learning about its properties and techniques for building with this versatile material. Whether you’re a design enthusiast, a professional, or simply curious, this workshop offers a rare opportunity to engage with sustainable design practices in a practical and creative way.
Our involvement in London Design Festival reflects our commitment to innovation and sustainability. We’re excited to share our passion for bamboo and sustainable transport with the festival’s global audience. Spaces are limited, so be sure to join us and be part of this inspiring event!
VISIT THE LONDON DESIGN FESTIVAL WEBSITE
"In a quiet corner of Hackney Wick, Ian McMillan and James Marr are helping Londoners customise their rides."
"In today's consumer driven mass produced society, little thought is given to the design, function and making process of the items we purchase."
Bamboo Bicycle Building at London Design Festival
London Design Festival is one of the world's most significant design events — a week-long celebration of creativity and innovation that attracts over 600,000 visitors and thousands of designers, makers, and cultural institutions from across the globe. For the BBC to participate in London Design Festival is to place bamboo bicycle building squarely within the broader conversation about sustainable design, craft practice, and the future of making.
The BBC's installation offered visitors the opportunity to watch bamboo bicycle building in progress, handle raw bamboo culms and finished frames, and understand the engineering principles that make bamboo such an effective structural material. For many visitors, this was their first encounter with the idea that a bicycle frame could be grown rather than manufactured — and the realisation was genuinely surprising.
Design Festival audiences bring a different perspective to bamboo bicycle building than cycling audiences. Where cyclists ask about performance and handling, designers ask about material sourcing, manufacturing process, end-of-life recyclability, and the aesthetics of craft marks left visible in the finished product. These questions push the BBC to articulate its proposition in new ways — and in doing so, sharpen the understanding of what bamboo bicycle building is really about.
The BBC's presence at London Design Festival reflects a belief that sustainable design is not a niche category — it is the future of all design. Bamboo bicycle building is one model for how that future might look: materials that grow rather than being extracted; products made by their users rather than by factories; objects that carry meaning because of how they were made and by whom.