Bamboo bikes at an engineering school in Brixton

South Bank Engineering UTC opened on Brixton Hill in 2016 as a University Technical College built around engineering — exactly the kind of place where a bamboo bike makes sense not as a novelty but as a piece of applied design and manufacturing. The Bamboo Bicycle Club became one of the school's industry partners.

The school

A UTC is a technical school with a focus on a specialist field, backed by a university and local employers. South Bank Engineering UTC, in the London Borough of Lambeth, was set up around engineering, business and healthcare, and sponsored by London South Bank University. Its students work on real projects with real industry partners — the Bamboo Bicycle Club among them.

What we do with students

Building a bamboo bike frame is hands-on engineering from start to finish: measuring and planning the geometry, cutting and mitring the tubes, joining the frame, and finishing a bike that can actually be ridden away. It sits naturally across design technology, product design and engineering — a single project that turns materials, manufacturing and sustainable design from a topic on a worksheet into something a young person makes with their own hands.

Why it matters

Bringing real frame building into an engineering school does two things at once. It gives students a finished, rideable object they built themselves, and it shows them that low-carbon manufacturing is something you can do on a workbench, not just read about. That is the part of our education work we care most about: putting the craft directly into young people's hands. Across more than a decade we've taught over 4,000 people to build, in 36+ countries, since 2012.

Proof & links

• Schools and education programmes: get in touch at info@bamboobicycleclub.org