The Cyclemas Story: Oxford Turns

What I came up with put one of Oxford’s most abundant waste products to use: abandoned bicycles. They’re a predominant feature of Oxford life, the first things you notice when you look down from the spires that greet you from the train or the coach station. Thousands are stolen and retrieved by the police. Thousands are outgrown by children and put to pasture in the garden. Thousands end up abandoned by students. They lie in parks and alleys. Their vandalised remains stay locked to gates and racks. They rot at the bottom of the canal and in the recycling centre.

Oxford City Council was cautiously delighted by the idea of a Christmas Tree made of bicycles, and with only a vague sketch from me, the Area Committees bravely agreed to put up some funding. Modern Art Oxford (MAO) also worked up more funding and agreed to produce the tree. The City agreed to help gather some bicycles found in parks and canals. So did the Oxford Cycle Workshop and Thames Valley Police. Even my neighbour, Barrie Juniper, the Emeritus Professor of Botany, managed to spring a couple of abandoned bikes from St Catherine’s College.

But, like people, it’s very nearly exclusively adult bicycles that end up abandoned in the streets, or end up down the police station. The unwanted forlorn children’s bicycle is a more subtle and furtive creature. They’re to be found in gardens, hidden from the public. Thieves tend to pass over them in favour of more expensive takings in the adult world, so few end up with the police. And it’s not entirely clear when a child’s bicycle is abandoned by its owner in the first place. What tends to happen is that children either outgrow a bicycle, or some minor repair goes unfixed, and the bicycle is left outside to deteriorate. Too good to chuck out, too worn or small to ride, they moulder unseen. All this I discovered while I was frantically trying to gather the 20 children’s bicycles required by the design of the Cyclemas Tree.

With so little time to gather the cycles, the project looked like it might flounder at an early practical hurdle, one that seemed unforgiveable. People tended to throw children’s bikes out rather than recycle them. There were only a handful gathered from Redbridge Recycling Centre by Oxfor Cycle Workshop. In a desperate moment, I pleaded with the vicar of the church associated with SS Philips and St James’ Primary, my daughter’s school, to let me top off the school’s Christingle Service to make an appeal to parents and kids for unwanted children’s bicycles. This would be my only chance to address parents and children together. Rev Andrew Bunch instantly saw the affinity between the Cyclemas Tree and the Christingle. He graciously wove my bicycle appeal into the end of his service and let me make my announcement.

From then on, unwanted children’s bicycles would appear in my front garden, usually with a name attached. I’d made a promise before God and the congregation that every child donor’s name would appear on a sign that would proudly stand near the Cyclemas Tree.. Some bicycles had gone through families of four children. Most kids requested that their bicycle bells be removed and returned to them. All the children were delighted by the prospect of spotting their old bicycles near the top of the tree. Cyclemas, so close to perishing, was saved at the last minute by a children’s crusade.

Not that all the children’s bicycles were a blessing. In fact, there was one bicycle, one tiny pink one, that nearly brought down the whole of Cyclemas. It came to be referred to with growing anxiety and fear as “Charlotte’s Bike”.

Dominic Scofield and James Dawton of Oxford Cycle Workshop donate bicycles harvested from Redbridge Recycling Centre