why he does it
A 2,000 sq ft workshop opened inside HMP Lowdham Grange in January 2025. It had wall-mounted jigs, hand tools and a course James Marr had written the year before. By July OCN London had accredited it at Level 2. In September the Financial Times came to write about it.
James trained as an engineer at Aston University. His first job was water hydraulics at Thames Water. The ones after it were small wind and hydro power, the kind of engineering where the simplest fix is the one that survives.
He spent two summers in upstate New York, running facilities and maintenance at Homes for the Homeless's camps in Harriman State Park. For many children from the city's family shelters, it is their first summer outside New York.
Then came Vancouver's Downtown Eastside. There he co-led a maintenance business that hired people coming out of homelessness, addiction and prison, paid them and coached them towards permanent work. That, he says, is 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."
"I believe building things is powerful, and can help people progress in their lives."
James Marr, speaking to Inside Time, November 2025
Back in Britain, he and fellow engineer Ian McMillan spent two years in a workshop in Brecon, in the Welsh hills. They worked out how to build a bicycle frame from bamboo well enough to teach it. In 2012 they opened Bamboo Bicycle Club in Hackney Wick, what the Guardian called the UK's first bamboo bike workshop.
The premise was awkward on purpose. Nobody is sold a finished bike: you build your own, from a grass you can cut with hand tools.
The club now works at both ends of the problem he first saw in Vancouver: in schools before exclusion, and in prisons after. The public workshops and kits pay for it. "Most of the people we teach are quite affluent," he told Inside Time, "so my goal is to open that up to people who aren't able to afford it."
