The Seacroft cycling group putting people before pedals

Seacroft Cycles is proving that cycling is not just about bikes, it is about people, community connection, and personal empowerment.

The community bike project started three years ago with just six donated bikes and a Saturday partnership with Cycle North to teach people to ride. Since then it has grown into what Clarrie calls “quite a holistic thing.” There are sessions on how to ride a bike, how to fix one, and a stock of donated machines that volunteers collect, repair and pass on. Every bike that leaves the workshop is checked over by mechanics trained to a professional industry standard. 

Clarrie Ramsden, the “Chief of Everything” at Seacroft Cycles, was recently recognised for her profound local impact. She was named one of the 100 most influential women in cycling by Cycling UK and took home the Inspirational Community Champion Award at the Leeds Sports Awards. For Ramsden, however, the true reward is seeing how the project transforms lives and hands independence back to East Leeds residents. 

She explained: “Cycling isn’t even about bikes, cycling is about people, it’s about getting together, about doing something together, making friends, and training yourself.”

Clarrie didn’t expect a bike ride to bring her to tears. But a few weeks ago, that’s exactly what happened on a ride near her home.

It’s the kind of moment that explains, more than any spreadsheet or funding bid ever could, why Seacroft Cycles exists.

After being unable to cycle for two years, she was finally given a new lease of life after a knee replacement.She explained: “I got on the bike, and I cycled, and I was cycling and cried because it gave my freedom back. So, when you’ve got a bike, you don’t have to wait for a bus, you can go where you want.” 

Crucially, Seacroft Cycles is a space built for everybody, not just the confident or the able bodied. Seacroft Cycles keeps a fleet of adaptive bikes, including trikes for people with balance problems, tandems that let visually impaired riders sit behind a sighted pilot, a bike adapted to carry a wheelchair, and hand cycles. “It’s not like, oh, then you’re in once a month or whatever, but it’s the same opportunity for everybody. You want to come for a ride, come along, let’s go for a ride,” Clarrie says.

That openness has changed lives close to home. Clarrie’s own husband, a retired NHS worker left with mental health difficulties after he stopped working, now volunteers as a mechanic. “He’s happier, more confident, qualified, working really makes him feel a lot better,” she says. 

Another volunteer, a former NHS admin worker now in her seventies, has found a new role using her organisational skills to help keep the project running. When Clarrie herself took three months away, the project carried on without her. “Whilst I’ve been off, this place has run itself, which is a testament, really, to the asset-based community development way,” she says. “It’s about empowerment and ownership.”

For Clarrie, the benefits of getting on a bike go far beyond fitness. Not only do her cycling workshops help improve confidence, getting active can help to improve balance, lower blood pressure, and improve physical health and wellbeing. 

For her the real measure sits closer to home, in a husband who feels useful again, in two teenagers choosing spanners over trouble, and in the simple freedom of getting on a bike and going, as she says, “to have the adaptive fleet, so that anybody of any ability can have that experience.” 

The workshop is open on Wednesdays from 10am to 12pm, and on Fridays until 4pm, with the last two hours given over to a session called Folks and Spokes, part repair shop, part support space, summed up by its own strap line: “drink tea, talk rubbish, fix bikes.” Saturdays are open until midday too, with public fix and ride sessions and a monthly learn-to-fix-your-bike workshop.