“A bike gives you control. It gives you independence,” Tash Ferguson tells me from outside the Bristol Bike Project.
She’s standing next to a line of bikes; sturdy mountain bikes crowd next to a colourful mullet gravel bike itself positioned alongside almost every variety of road bike, all refurbished and ready to be sold on, or donated to the community. People come from all over Bristol to pick up a bike from the project, some referred on from NHS mental health services, or by addiction recovery or homelessness support groups, or those awaiting refugee or asylum seeker status. Ferguson and I are talking about what a bike means when it’s no longer a luxury, but a tool.
“You lose control in so many ways [as an asylum seeker/refugee]. It’s a bit like becoming a kid again, where everybody tells you what to do and what you’re wearing and what you’re eating and where you live and when you’re doing the next thing,” Ferguson explains.
For Ferguson, the bike can help give these individuals some independence: “It connects you with the place that you are, whether that’s the place that you’ll always be, or whether you’re here for a period of time. It allows you to connect with the services and the local community, which is so important, because it can be so alienating to be dumped in a city, or on the outskirts of a city and not knowing people, not knowing how to access things that you need to rebuild your life.”
Underneath the semi-circle wheel of Bristol Bike Project’s logo is their tagline: ‘bikes without barriers’. When the project started 17 years ago after founders James Lucas and Colin Fan returned from four weeks bike packing in Scandinavia, their mission was clear: to provide affordable transport for asylum seekers in Bristol. Now, nearly two decades on, Bristol Bike Project sells and fixes bikes to fund a community programme donating bikes to the people who need it most. But accessible, affordable transport is still a hard-won privilege for many in their city.
Ferguson tells me that some of the asylum seekers she meets in the workshop spend much of their time chasing paperwork, going to compulsory “signing appointments” in Patchway, six miles north of Bristol. “I’ve been to Patchway once in my life, and I’ve lived in Bristol all my life. It’s a long way,” Ferguson laughs in a kind of disbelief. A single ticket to Patchway from the city centre is £2.30. An “anywhere day ticket” is £7 – the same amount asylum seekers (of whom 106,771 were being supported by the UK government as of March) are given daily to survive on.
This is why bikes, Ferguson explains, have become a lifeline for many, though keeping them on the road once they’ve been given them is a problem in itself.
“People often have quite chaotic lives, and are quite transient through no choice of their own, and this particularly applies to asylum seekers. For the last couple of years people have been housed in hotels and have been moved overnight, or at incredibly short notice up and down the country, even to Scotland in the middle of nowhere. They haven’t been able to take their bikes with them, or even know where they’re going. Lots of bikes just get left in hallways or accommodation.”
“Gladly we haven’t been asylum seekers for a while now and we have a house and jobs and a chance to make a living in these times. So we would like to donate back the bikes that we kindly were offered.”
(Image credit: Women on Wheels)
Seven hours north, in Glasgow’s Govanhill, Shgufta Anwar, founder of ‘Women on Wheels’, has just nipped out of the cycling sessions she helps host for refugees and women seeking asylum to talk to me. Anwar founded the women-only bike charity back in 2022 after discovering the joy of cycling herself, and the gap there seemed to be for women of colour in the cycling community. And, like at the Bristol Bike Project, the commitment to work with refugees and asylum seekers was with them from the start, through a collaboration with Amy Graham, of Sisters Cycling.
“Having run a women’s only project, we realised that women have lots of barriers to cycling, and they want a dedicated space in order to thrive and get more from it,” Anwar told me.
“We used to do maintenance classes, and we used to maybe get one or two people, mostly men, that used to come. Then we did women-only maintenance classes, and there were between six to twelve women that came to those sessions consistently each month.”
“We get lots of refugees and asylum seekers that come along. The impact is amazing. They have absolutely chaotic lives. They come here and they’re worried about lawyers appointments, and they’re worried about the visa applications, and then they come here, and there’s a swing in their step when they leave. There’s just so much joy that they get from cycling.”
Women on Wheels was created out of a need in the community for a space to play, to learn and to connect. One woman who came attended the sessions run by Anwar and the team was called Sammy.
“She had some mental health issues, and she came to loads of lessons. She couldn’t ride properly, or balance on the bike, and she came to one session, and there was a white woman who was able to get pedalling in one go. She was turning and she was signalling and looking over her shoulder, and Sam felt quite low in herself, because the other woman had managed to pick up everything so quickly.
“So Sammy was quite down about it, and I talked to her and said that part of her problem was that she came and was like, ‘I can’t cycle, I can’t cycle, I can’t cycle.’ She came with a ‘can’t’ mindset, and then stopped coming to our sessions. And then after a few months I heard from her. She’d managed to get herself a bike, and was cycling about the place.”
Separated from the glamour of the WorldTours, and the privilege of having a bike “for every occasion” (of which I’m finding myself increasingly guilty), the bicycle returns to its original function – as a transformative, and necessary mode of transport. For the people picking bikes up from the Bristol Bike Project, or learning how good it can feel to get yourself from A to B by your own steam over in Glasgow, the bike is independence, power, a kind of small freedom not felt in the measured lives of those awaiting confirmation of safety.
In Bristol Bike Project’s 10-year anniversary video, one voice rings bright and hopeful: “I’ve never been on a bike before,” the voice says, grinning through the airwaves. The video bleeds into a sequence of bike riders, smiling, the countryside zipping by.
“But the first time I tried it I felt free. Like I was in control of something again.”
To donate a bike to the Bristol Bike Project, or to get involved as a volunteer you can find their website here. If you would like to find out more about Women on Wheels, you can find out more here.
