Inside Time: Bamboozling Way to Build Bikes — Bamboo Bicycle Club at Lowdham Grange

“The bamboo bike course offers more than just technical training — it provides an avenue for creativity, teamwork, and self-expression.” — Sally Allsopp, Industries Manager, HMP Lowdham Grange

Inside Time — the national newspaper for prisoners, distributed inside UK prisons and available online — published a full feature on the Bamboo Bicycle Club’s Build to Bond programme at HMP Lowdham Grange in November 2025. The article, headlined “Innovative workshop course provides ray of light at troubled jail”, provided the most detailed public account of the programme’s operation to date: six prisoners per cohort, a six-week course, a waiting list, three prisoners trained as instructors, and a Level 2 certificate in Sustainable Design and Manufacturing on completion.

Inside Time’s readership is the programme’s own community — prisoners, their families, prison staff, and criminal justice advocates. Coverage in Inside Time is not just media validation; it is communication directly to the people the programme serves and the professionals who run the institutions where it operates. For potential partner prisons considering the programme, an Inside Time feature is the most credible possible endorsement: the programme’s recipients speaking to its value.

The programme

At Lowdham Grange — a Cat-B men’s prison with approximately 900 residents, including a significant proportion serving life sentences — Build to Bond operates in the industrial workshop. BBC’s bamboo is cut and shaped with hand tools; no specialist machinery is required, which makes it viable in a prison workshop environment where power tools and precision equipment may be restricted. James Marr identified bamboo’s specific advantage precisely: same tensile strength as steel, entirely hand-tool workable.

The Inside Time article documented an aspect of the programme rarely covered in mainstream press: the final week, in which frames built during the course are disassembled so materials can be reused by the next cohort. This constraint — which might seem like a disappointment for participants who cannot keep their builds — is also, the article noted, what makes the programme financially sustainable. The participants who progress to the Build to Bond follow-up programme build a children’s bamboo bike to gift to their own son, daughter, nephew, niece, or grandchild. That bike they keep.

“Finding employment after release reduces the chance of reoffending significantly, which is why we are improving opportunities to help prisoners turn their lives around. Innovative projects, such as Build to Bond, support rehabilitation and help people leave prison as better citizens, boosting the economy and keeping our streets safe.” — Lord (James) Timpson, UK Prisons Minister

Ministerial endorsement

Lord Timpson’s endorsement of Build to Bond — reproduced in full in the Inside Time article — is significant in the context of the publication. Timpson, appointed as Prisons Minister in 2024, is himself a former employer of hundreds of ex-offenders through Timpson the shoe repair company, and is one of the few senior government ministers with direct commercial experience of post-release employment. His endorsement of a specific rehabilitation programme by name, published in the national newspaper for prisoners, carries weight that no press release or charity award citation can replicate.

The Inside Time feature appeared in November 2025, the same year as BBC’s Financial Times Weekend profile (September 2025) and Investec Beyond Business award (September 2025). Together, these three pieces of coverage made 2025 the highest-profile year in BBC’s 13-year history — with the Build to Bond programme receiving its first sustained national and specialist media attention simultaneously.

Read the full article on Inside Time →