Bamboo Bicycle Club workshop opens at HMP Lindholme

A Category C training prison near Doncaster has become the second UK prison to run Bamboo Mobility Project's accredited bike-building programm.

Doncaster, August 2026

In May, the room was four brick walls and a swept floor. By the middle of July it was a bicycle workshop jigs bolted to the walls, benches built by the prison's own staff, and the first group of Makers standing at them.

A few weeks later those same men stood up in front of an audience of prison staff and pitched business ideas of their own. Most of them had walked into the room having never made anything.

"You could see the engagement from the back of the room," the prison's Industries team reported afterwards.

A training prison, a long-stay population

HMP Lindholme holds around a thousand adult men on the site of a former RAF station near Hatfield Woodhouse. It is a Category C training prison, and everyone held there is serving a sentence of four years or more which is precisely why the six-week course fits. A programme that asks a man to commit to building something over six weeks needs men who will still be there in week six.

The course arrived at Lindholme this summer, the same one first proven at HMP Lowdham Grange, where it has run since March 2025 and where Makers who completed the course have gone on to support new learners as peer instructors.

What is taught in the workshop

Over six weeks, each Maker takes a bundle of raw bamboo and turns it into a bicycle — measuring, cutting, jointing and wrapping it by hand. Hand tools only. Week one is a short bamboo craft project; by week three they are building frames on the jig; by week five they are fitting brakes and wheels to a bike they made themselves.

Along the way the course carries everything else it can fit in: measurement and tolerances, materials science, quality control, working as a bench team — and business-case work that ends with the Makers pitching their ideas out loud.

The distinction that matters to prisons is that this is manufacturing, not repair. Nothing is donated, stripped and rebuilt. Every bicycle starts as raw material and is made from scratch.

The final week closes the loop. The bikes come apart, the connectors go back in the box, the bamboo is recycled, and the workshop is reset for the next cohort the same circular thinking the course teaches, and the reason a prison can run this cohort after cohort without filling a warehouse. What leaves with the Maker is the qualification: a bespoke OCN London Level 2 in Workshop Skills and Sustainable Manufacturing.

Built to be run by prison staff

The programme is designed to be delivered by the prison, not by a visiting provider. Prison instructors are trained on site over two days, then run the daily sessions themselves using a digital instructor platform, with Bamboo Mobility Project visiting every cohort for quality assurance.

The workshop runs on hand tools only, with shadow boards and witnessed tool counts, water-based paints and varnishes, and a full safety data sheet pack issued to the site health and safety officer at onboarding. The Lowdham Grange workshop has operated since March 2025 with no security incidents.

At Lindholme, prison staff had built the workbenches before the installation team arrived.

In James's words

"I've set up workshops for fourteen years and the first week still gets me someone who swears they're 'no good with their hands' holding up a clean, tight joint they made," said James Marr, founder of Bamboo Bicycle Club and CEO of Bamboo Mobility Project CIC.'

Completion rates on the programme are strong. In the first cohort at Lowdham Grange, nine in ten of the men who started the course finished it, and everyone who finished achieved the qualification. In a place where most of the day happens to you rather than because of you, choosing to finish something is the whole story.

What's next

The first Cohort has started running and will run for the next 8 weeks completing both programmes.