James Marr

In January 2025 a 2,000 sq ft workshop opened inside HMP Lowdham Grange, with wall-mounted jigs, hand tools and a course James Marr had written the year before. He fitted out the room himself and, across the programme’s four prison sites, has trained fourteen prison staff to teach it. By the end of July the Lowdham course was accredited at OCN Level 2, and in September the Financial Times wrote about it.

Marr is an industrial designer and engineer. He grew up in the countryside and trained at Aston University; his first job was in water hydraulics at Thames Water, and the ones after it were in small wind and hydro power, the kind of engineering where the simplest fix is the one that survives. In between came two summers in upstate New York, running facilities and maintenance across Homes for the Homeless’s camp sites in Harriman State Park, where children from the city’s family shelters get a bunk, a swim and, for many of them, a first summer outside New York.

Then, in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, he co-led a maintenance business that hired people coming out of homelessness, addiction and prison, paid them, and coached them toward permanent work. It is, he says, where the idea for Bamboo Bicycle Club took root. He is dyslexic. “A lot of people in prison are disillusioned and have been failed by the education system,” he told Inside Time in 2025. “I am dyslexic myself, so I can sort of relate.”

Back in Britain he and fellow engineer Ian McMillan spent two years in a workshop in Brecon, in the Welsh hills, working out how to build a bicycle frame from bamboo well enough to teach it. In 2012 they opened Bamboo Bicycle Club in Hackney Wick. The premise was awkward on purpose. Nobody would be sold a finished bike; you built your own, from a grass you can cut with hand tools, in a workshop rather than a factory. Fourteen years on he still teaches every cohort himself.

The club now works at both ends of the problem he first saw in Vancouver. In schools and with youth services it teaches young people before they are excluded; in prisons, after. Build to Bond, the prison programme, is a six-week accredited course in which men build a balance bike that goes home to their own child. The public workshops and kits pay for it. “Most of the people we teach are quite affluent,” he says, “so my goal is to open that up to people who aren’t able to afford it.”

His own practice is in bamboo and natural-fibre composites. He helped set up Node Company and its bamboo structural connector, with housing prototypes for KuNa in Mexico; designed a bamboo pavilion with the humanitarian architecture charity Article 25 for the London Festival of Architecture at Canary Wharf; and was retained by the Association for Progressive Communications to design bamboo masts for community wi-fi networks in Brazil and Indonesia. With Oxford Brookes University he built what BikeBiz called the world’s first bamboo frame with 3D-printed lugs, live at the Design Museum in April 2016.

The method has travelled. In 2019 the club’s Munich workshop hosted the Ethiopian designer Abel Hailegiorgis, who used the same frame-building technique to prototype a folding bamboo wheelchair. He went on to found Bamboo Labs in Addis Ababa, which now makes bamboo wheelchairs and bikes, and Marr has backed it since with kits, technical drawings and a student design brief at the University of Surrey. In 2014 the UN Environment Programme chose a Bamboo Bicycle Club bike to illustrate UN-REDD’s REDD+ Sourcebook; in 2016 the GREAT Britain campaign picked the club’s aerodynamic bamboo bike for Number 10’s Innovation is GREAT showcase in Liverpool, where it was shown alongside Airbus’s Mars rover.

For three years he co-marked UCL’s Mechanical Engineering Master’s programme with Dr Eral Bele, setting and assessing projects that included a 150 kg cargo bike and an agricultural bike for African farmers. He has written for Permaculture and for the Design & Technology Association’s Designing, and contributed the catalogue essay Reimagining Bicycle Craftsmanship to Match: Design & Sport, Konstantin Grcic’s exhibition at the Musée du Luxembourg in Paris.

Build to Bond now runs across four UK prison sites, at different stages of delivery. He is a director of Bamboo Mobility Project CIC, the community interest company through which every bike the public builds funds a place for someone locked out of education.