2016

Inhabitat covered our bamboo racing bike at the Design Museum

21 January 2016By Bamboo Bicycle Club

When the design press writes about you, the bit that matters isn't the headline — it's that a bamboo frame, the kind anyone can learn to build, was being taken seriously next to the best bikes in the country.

Context

In late 2015 the Design Museum staged Cycle Revolution, an exhibition curated by Donna Loveday that set out to capture the whole sweep of contemporary cycling. One of our aerodynamic bamboo racing frames was chosen to go on display. The green-design publication Inhabitat picked up the story while the show was on.

What we did

We had built an aerodynamic bamboo racing frame — bamboo tubes split and reformed into aero seat, down and top tube profiles, joined with flax-fibre composite lugs, with the cables routed internally to keep the lines clean. As Inhabitat and others noted at the time, without the visible grain you could mistake it for carbon. That frame went on display at the museum for the run of the exhibition.

The outcome

Cycle Revolution ran from 18 November 2015 to 5 June 2016 and drew more than 70,000 visitors, so our frame sat in front of a large public audience over the show's run. Inhabitat's coverage described it, in the outlet's own words, as the world's most advanced bamboo bike.

In their words

"The team behind Bamboo Bicycle Club recently created the world's most advanced bamboo bike which is currently on display at the 'Cycle Revolution' exhibition in London's Design Museum until June 2016."
— Inhabitat

Why it matters

The club exists so that an ordinary person, with their own hands, can build something genuinely good. Having one of those frames stand alongside professional and Olympic-level bikes in a national design museum — and having the design press treat it on those terms — is the clearest version of that idea we could ask for.

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