Wharf Life: How Bamboo Bicycle Club Helps Its Customers Build Their Own Rides

“Visitors to the Canning Town workshop can see all sorts of machines created from bamboo including tricycles, electric variants and rides with oversize chunky backbones.” — Jon Massey, Wharf Life, August 2022

Wharf Life — the East London and Docklands community newspaper covering Canary Wharf, Isle of Dogs, Royal Docks, and Canning Town — published a full feature on Bamboo Bicycle Club in August 2022, following BBC’s relocation from Hackney Wick to Caxton Works in Canning Town. Journalist Jon Massey visited the workshop in person and documented the operation at its new East London base.

Wharf Life’s readership is hyperlocal — the communities along the Lea Valley and Royal Docks corridor, from Canary Wharf to Stratford. For BBC, coverage in Wharf Life was both a local press milestone (introducing the new Canning Town address to its immediate community) and a signal of the workshop’s continuing commitment to East London as its base after nearly a decade in Hackney Wick.

The move to Canning Town

BBC relocated from Hackney Wick to Caxton Works, Canning Town in 2020 — driven in part by the rising rents that have displaced many creative enterprises from Hackney Wick since the post-Olympics development boom. Caxton Works is a cluster of studios and workshops in Canning Town that has attracted makers, designers, and small manufacturers seeking affordable space in the Royal Docks area. BBC’s move maintained its East London creative-manufacturing identity while accessing a new community.

Massey’s feature documented the variety of BBC’s workshop output: not just road and mountain bike frames but tricycles, electric cargo bikes, and experimental geometries. The “oversize chunky backbones” description reflects something real about bamboo as a material — the larger-diameter sections of Guadua bamboo used in cargo and utility frames have a visual presence quite different from racing or commuter frames. A BBC workshop contains objects that don’t look like anything manufactured in a standard bicycle factory.

“The spirit of the original club still forms the spine of the business. They don’t sell finished bikes — only kits and building sessions in workshops.” — Jon Massey, Wharf Life, August 2022

Ten years on, the model holds

Massey’s observation — that “the spirit of the original club still forms the spine of the business” — was published in August 2022, ten years after BBC launched in September 2012. In that decade, the company had expanded from monthly workshops to weekly sessions, launched home-build kits available globally, developed the Build to Bond prison programme, opened workshops in Amersfoort and Toulouse, and won the Investec Beyond Business award. But the founding principle — no finished bikes, only building sessions and kits — had not changed.

For the Wharf Life readership of young East London professionals, the BBC workshop in Canning Town represented exactly the kind of local business the area needed: skilled, original, community-oriented, and rooted in East London’s manufacturing tradition. Massey’s feature introduced BBC to its new Canning Town neighbours and documented an operation that, after a decade of growth, still operated on its founding principle.

Read the full feature on Wharf Life →