Tucked away in a quiet corner at the very edge of London’s western border, Fassnidge Park is the home of a truly remarkable social enterprise called Recycle-a-Bike. As well as selling new cycles and accessories, the team are doing work that goes beyond what you might find in your typical shop.
Twenty years ago, founder Nick was working in the NHS and wanted his clients to get cycling, so needed bikes.
Nick: “Yeah, bit of a snowball thing of wanting patients to get bikes. [I asked] in a few meetings, ‘Anyone got any bikes?’ I got loads of people saying ‘I got a bike, I’m going to the dump. Do you want it?’ Loads of bikes started coming in. All nearly work, so we literally just got together a group volunteers, started doing them up, gave them to mental health clients, and they were cycling off, using it as a mode of transport, using it to come to the hospital for appointments”.
“It’s got bigger and bigger and starting to snowball into a community workshop. People will come in off the street: ‘Can you do a bike service? Can you do a bike repair?’, we could do that. So then we just got Cytech qualified. Got a few volunteers”.
I ask Nick what Cytech is, he responds: “The qualification for a bike mechanic, so anything in the bike industry, everyone will look for a Cytech at level 1 or 2. Level 2 is most preferable, but that’s, like, the sort of benchmark you need to kind of get into a bike shop or a bike job. We train people from referrals that come into us, some people have a bit of knowledge about bikes, some people have no knowledge at all. We do our own training here, and if they’re good enough, then we try and support them, fund it, to try and get them to do Cytech. And the idea is that we get more and more people qualified to come and help other people that are not qualified here. So we’ve got more bodies to help train, we’ve got more bodies to help repair bikes”.
Who would they get referred by?
“Local mental health services, NHS. We’ve got a partnership with a local college, so we see students from there that may have a mental health diagnosis or mild learning disabilities. We’re taking a few of those, see how it goes, they come in here [the shop/workshop], they go work in our café as well”.
If someone wanted to have their bike recycled, how would they go about that?
“You can literally just phone and say, oh, can I bring a bike in for donation? You can just pull up and unload it. We do have a collection service, but we don’t have many drivers for the van, so it is a bit of a backlog on that. So if people say that ‘I have no car, I can’t get to you. If you can get to me, I’ve got a bike here’, then we just try and book it on our collections log, a driver goes out, we try and do multiple collections”.
Have you got any idea of how many bikes just get junked, going to a tip?
“Per year, I mean, we see within a year, 100s of bikes. We recycle and reuse, probably at the moment, about two to three out of ten bikes that come in, because we get a lot of bikes that come in that are either cracked frames or broken, or just real low quality”.
“We’re all passionate cyclists here. We want you to be able to ride a bike, you know. We don’t just want to sell you the most expensive bike and walk off”.
In my short time observing, this is certainly what I notice. There is a buzz around the place with several people visiting for repairs or collecting their bikes (as I was). A mother and her two children seek out a larger bike for one of the children who is riding a tiny bike that she has clearly outgrown. Nick takes the time to listen to her needs and says he doesn’t really have anything suitable and recommends they wait until something suitable comes in. When he notices one of the children becoming upset, his training kicks in and he offers to step away whilst they have some time to themselves.
I have a cherished old mountain bike with a knackered shifter which other enterprises have failed to repair, but given the extensive collection of recycled parts that this place has access to, they managed to get my bike going within hours, for the princely sum of £20.
You could be forgiven at the moment for feeling that the world is full of people looking after themselves and giving no thought for the less fortunate in our communities. Then you meet people like Nick and his team and realise just how wrong you are.
If you have a cycle you don’t use that could be useful to someone else, contact Recycle-a-Bike on 01895 347 210