James Marr Joins The Engineering Club for a Talk on Wooden Bike Design

The context

On 30 October 2025, The Engineering Club — a London organisation that runs public engineering talks — hosted an evening talk on timber and wooden bike-frame design at a central London venue. The session, "The Original Carbon: High-Performance Wooden Bike Design," was free to attend via Eventbrite and drew an audience of engineers, designers and the curious.

The premise was one close to our hearts: wood and bamboo treated as serious, high-performance engineering materials for bicycles — not heritage curiosities.

What we did

The Engineering Club invited Bamboo Bicycle Club to take part. The main talk was given by another speaker, whose closing slide turned to bamboo — a natural cue to hand over to us. **James Marr added a short set of remarks at the end**, roughly ten minutes, on what Bamboo Bicycle Club does and what we have learned building bamboo bicycle frames with people all over the world.

For us, that is the value of an event like this: no workshop fee, no kit to buy, just a room of engineers willing to take a natural material seriously. It is a chance to share our method with an audience our hands-on workshops do not usually reach.

Verified outcome

• A real, free public talk on wooden and bamboo bike design, hosted by The Engineering Club in

central London on 30 October 2025.

• Bamboo Bicycle Club contributed as an invited guest speaker, closing the evening with a short

talk about our work.

• One more sign that the wider engineering and design community is taking bamboo seriously as a

performance material — building on appearances such as the UK Bamboo Summit at Coventry University in September 2024.

In their words

The Engineering Club's organiser, on inviting us to take part:

"Nick's final slide is about bamboo, so it would link really nicely to your piece."

Why it matters

Most of what we do is hands-on: people building real frames in real workshops. But events like this let us put bamboo in front of professional engineers and make the technical case directly. Every time bamboo is treated as a credible structural material in that kind of room, it makes our schools, universities and community work a little easier — because the science is doing the talking.

Links

• The Engineering Club: engineeringclub.co.uk
• Learn the craft yourself: bamboobicycleclub.org