James Marr — the full story
The long version
Fourteen years, told properly
The short version is that an engineer thought people should build their own bicycles. The longer version explains how that ended up inside four prisons.
How it happened
From a Hackney workshop to a prison wing
2012
An engineer looking for the simplest answer
James trained as an engineer and spent his early career in water hydraulics at Thames Water, then in renewable micro power generation. Both taught the same discipline: find the solution with the fewest moving parts that other people can actually maintain.
The workshop in Hackney
He founded Bamboo Bicycle Club in London with fellow engineer Ian McMillan on a deliberately awkward premise — that people should build their own bicycles rather than buy them. The material was bamboo: it grows without human intervention, matures in roughly three to five years, regrows from root stock, and can be cut and joined with hand tools. That last property is the one that mattered most later.
–2016
Kits, and then the world
The workshop model became a kit: bamboo tubes, a jig, natural fibre and resin, backed by tutorials and direct access to the founder. The first school build is on record from 2014. A Bamboo Bicycle Club frame went on display at the Design Museum in London, and James built the world’s first 3D-printed bamboo bicycle with Oxford Brookes University — live, in eight hours, in front of 70,000 visitors.
–2024
Recognition, and a long way from London
Selected as one of Kevin McCloud’s Green Heroes at Grand Designs Live in 2018. Kits reached customers in 45 countries, with roughly 80% of sales outside the UK. In 2023 the adventurer Kate Rawles rode a Bamboo Bicycle Club frame 8,288 miles from Colombia to Tierra del Fuego over eight months, with no recorded frame failure. In 2024 the work appeared in Match: Design & Sport at the Musée du Luxembourg in Paris.
The mission gets its own company
Bamboo Mobility Project CIC was incorporated in February 2025 as the trading and programme entity, with Bamboo Bicycle Club London Ltd holding the IP and R&D work. The same year brought £24,000 from Investec Beyond Business — selected from 148 applicants — and £18,000 from The National Lottery Community Fund’s Pedal Forward initiative.
Build to Bond
The prison programme is established across four UK prison sites at different delivery stages. Over six weeks, small cohorts of Makers build a complete bamboo bicycle frame from raw materials — 108 contact hours each — working towards two OCN London bespoke Level 2 courses. Fourteen prison staff have trained as instructors and more than ten Makers have progressed to peer mentor. The Financial Times covered it in September 2025.
Why bamboo was never the point
The material made the mission possible
A frame that can be built with hand tools needs no heavy plant, no specialist machinery and no factory. That is why the same build runs on a kitchen table, in a school classroom and on a prison education wing — and why the workshop equipment can stay with the prison when the cohort ends.
The engineering holds up. Bamboo frame tubing has been tested at Swansea University to BS ISO 22157:2019 — 84.3 MPa ultimate tensile, comparable to mild steel at a fraction of the weight. Joints are wrapped in flax fibre and two-part epoxy, or bonded into pre-formed aluminium lugs.
“We use bamboo bike-building to give practical skills and a way forward to people locked out of education — in schools before exclusion, and in prisons after.”
The mission, in one line
Swansea University, BS ISO 22157:2019 — tensile, flexural and compressive testing of bamboo tubing, published February 2023. Bamboo Mobility Project CIC, company no. 16257348. Bamboo Bicycle Club London Ltd, company no. 10809302.