A bamboo bike-building workshop, inside a university engineering lab

Bamboo Bicycle Club now has a permanent home inside the engineering labs at London South Bank University (LSBU) — a hands-on space where students and the wider community can build their own bamboo bikes.

The idea

Most people never get to make something they can ride. BBC's teaching has always been about closing that gap: real tools, real materials, a frame you build with your own hands. Putting that inside a university engineering lab makes it part of how the next generation of designers and makers learns — sustainability and practical skill in the same room.

What we did

We set up a dedicated bamboo bike-building space within LSBU's engineering labs at the Borough Road campus in London. LSBU has backed it with a £70,000 investment in equipment — including CNC and composites tooling — so the hub can run as a proper workshop, not a one-off pop-up.

From that base we run accredited frame-building courses and bootcamps on campus, and use the same space for research and development, including prototyping a bamboo-framed e-bike. The partnership grew out of work with LSBU's Product Design and Technology team, who saw the fit between BBC's reusable-lug build method and how they teach making.

What's happening now

The hub is active and running through 2025–26. It gives students and the local community a place to learn frame-building, and gives BBC a campus base to develop new bamboo products and accredited training — a model we want to take to other institutions.

In James's words

"We now have a space in the LSBU engineering labs at Southbank, and funding in place to run accredited courses."
— James Marr, founder, Bamboo Bicycle Club

Why it matters

Bamboo bike-building teaches design, manufacturing and patience — and it does it around a low-carbon material and a finished bike you can actually ride. Embedding that inside a university spreads the skills further and helps fund the social programmes BBC runs elsewhere, from schools to prison rehabilitation.

More

• BBC has trained 4,000+ builders across 36+ countries since 2012.
• Workshops: https://bamboobicycleclub.org/pages/workshops
• London South Bank University: https://www.lsbu.ac.uk