Two engineers, one bamboo bike, and a spot in the UK Government's GREAT British Showcase

In summer 2016, Bamboo Bicycle Club was chosen to exhibit in the "Innovation is GREAT" / GREAT British Showcase at the International Festival for Business in Liverpool — a UK Government exhibition curated by Number 10 to put the country's most interesting makers in front of an international audience.

The context

The Festival ran in Liverpool from 13 June to 1 July 2016. The GREAT British Showcase sat at its heart: a Government-curated display of British innovation, design and craft, aimed at trade and inward investment. Standing in that line-up — next to names like Airbus Defence and Space, which brought a Mars Rover engineering development model — was unusual company for a four-year-old workshop that grew out of a shed in Wales and a small space in Hackney.

What we did

We did what we always do: we brought the build. Bamboo Bicycle Club was founded by two engineers who love cycling — James Marr and Ian McMillan — on a simple idea: anyone can build their own bicycle frame. At the showcase we put that idea in front of an export-focused, international crowd, showing how a frame made from grass, hemp and epoxy, by hand, with hand tools, holds up to real riding.

Why it matters

Being selected for a Number 10-curated showcase is a credibility marker that's hard to manufacture. It placed a hand-tool, build-it-yourself workshop alongside some of the UK's best-known engineering and design names, and it did so on the strength of the craft itself — not marketing.

The work behind it

The same period saw the projects that made BBC more than a workshop:

• A bamboo cargo bike for farmers, designed and built with UCL Masters engineering students for use in low-resource settings — built to carry serious loads using only hand tools.
• A bamboo bike ridden from London to Singapore — around 22,000km — by builders who made their own frame and then trusted it across a continent.

Links

• The full London-to-Singapore story: https://bamboobicycleclub.org/blogs/impact/london-to-singapore-bamboo-bike-22000km
• The UCL cargo-bike project: https://bamboobicycleclub.org/blogs/impact/ucl-masters-bamboo-electric-cargo-bike-university
• About the International Festival for Business 2016: https://www.gov.uk/government/news/international-festival-for-business-2016-ifb2016

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A note on accuracy: this page deliberately leaves out claims that couldn't be verified. The Kevin McCloud quote sometimes attached to this event actually comes from a separate occasion — Grand Designs Live, Kevin McCloud's Green Heroes, in 2018 — and belongs there, not here.