Ahead of the opening of cycling exhibition 'The Perfect Machine' at Summerlee Museum in July 2014 we are profiling cyclists from around Lanarkshire and Glasgow.
Victoria Leiper manages the 'Better Way to Work' campaign for the Glasgow Bike Station and is the founder of the 'Belles on Bikes' women's cycling group.
“About 2 years ago now I was working for the Cycle Touring Club (CTC) and setting up cycle projects for young people across Glasgow. There was a project called Bike Club and I found that there were almost no girls were coming along to the sessions. I thought well wouldn’t it be great if we could do something which was aimed specifically at girls? There would maybe be one or two girls and they would be either out of their depth or alienated by the environment and then they would never come back again. So we set up some sessions that were specifically aimed at building confidence for girls to ride bikes and then that kind of evolved and I got calls from adults looking for some more sessions and my colleague and I decided well let’s get some funding and start up a ladies’ cycling group, like a leisure kind of a social group.
"We were successful, we received some funding from Cycling Scotland and so we set up Belles on Bikes. It was focused specifically on women and girls, any age really and we trained women volunteers as cycle trainers so that they could deliver sessions themselves. It has evolved with me, I left that job but I still wanted to be involved and still run the group but just as a volunteer and now 2 years later we’ve got over 250 members and a whole programme of sessions that we run across the city. We do trips away, we do events aimed at encouraging even more women to come along and we do beginners’ training sessions and we do rides that are like 100 miles long so there is something for everyone.
“There’s a sad story behind my bike: I was knocked off my old bike last December. It was one of the first bikes I bought, through the Cycle to Work scheme a few jobs ago and I loved it, it was a single speed bike that was just great for commuting and I had cyclocross tyres on it so I could ride along the canal or on any kind of surface. I loved it so much but unfortunately it was damaged after I was hit by a taxi in Garscube Road, it was awful. I was fine though just the bike was a bit damaged. After that I could probably have fixed the bike but it was written off by the bike shop and I never felt the same being on it. So, I got some money from the taxi’s insurance company and it wasn’t a huge amount but it was enough to build this bike, so I built it myself. The frame was a donation and pretty much everything on it is as it was, I just changed it to a single speed hub and I changed the bars and got this nice Brooks saddle also from the Bike Station and I love it, it’s better than the bike I had to say goodbye to. So it was a good thing that came out of a bad experience."
If you would like to be featured in 'Cycling Stories' please contact Justin Parkes, Industrial History Curator on 01236 856376; ParkesJ@culturenl.co.uk
'The Perfect Machine', Summerlee Museum of Scottish Industrial Life, Coatbridge
5 July to 14 September 2014
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