We took the canes into the room full of bamboo experts

When the UK's bamboo community gathered in Coventry, James Marr was invited not just to talk about building with bamboo, but to put the material in people's hands.

The room

The UK Bamboo Summit is a cross-sector gathering of the people working seriously with bamboo in Britain — engineers, architects, academics, artists and growers — convened to explore what this fast-growing, low-carbon material could do here at home. The 2024 summit was held in Coventry, with Coventry University among its partners alongside Imagineer Productions, Imagine Bamboo, Atelier One and the wider network behind World Bamboo Day.

It is a room full of specialists. Plenty of people there have spent careers studying bamboo's structure and behaviour. The challenge in a setting like that is the oldest one in sustainability: the gap between knowing a material is good for the planet and knowing how to actually work with it.

What we did

James Marr was invited to contribute — speaking to BBC's experience teaching bamboo bicycle building, and running a hands-on session so that delegates could feel the material for themselves rather than only hear about it. That is BBC's whole method, the same one used with school students, corporate teams and the Makers on our prison programmes: learning by doing. Cut a tube, understand how the grain wants to behave, wrap a joint — and a slide about "sustainable materials" becomes something you can hold.

It put BBC alongside others in that network — among them Atelier One, Imagine Bamboo and Brilliant Bamboo — as a practitioner rather than a spectator.

Why it matters

BBC has been teaching people to build bamboo bicycles since 2012 — more than 4,000 people trained and 3,500-plus frames built across 36-plus countries. That depth of hands-on experience is exactly what an academic summit doesn't always have in the room, and it is why the work increasingly connects to universities. BBC runs research and teaching collaborations with partners including University College London, King's College London and London South Bank University, where a £70,000 in-kind equipment partnership supports workshops and product R&D on campus.

The summit appearance sits inside that same story: craft, sustainability and education, taught with your hands.

Proof and links

• BBC holds genuine, nationally recognised accreditation built from scratch by James Marr: the OCN London Level 1 Award in Practical Bamboo Bicycle Building and the Level 2 Award in Sustainable Design and Manufacturing.
• Founded in London in 2012 by James Marr and Ian McMillan.
• UK Bamboo Summit 2024 partner listing: Imagine Bamboo (imagine-bamboo.co.uk).
• More on BBC's education and university work: bamboobicycleclub.org