KIDS GO FREE
How a grandfather in Newport set up his own kids’ bike charity from his back yard
Mike Jones’s garden in Newport looks like a second-hand bike shop. Hundreds of mountain bikes jostle for position alongside swings, peek out from behind shrubs and lean dangerously against the garden furniture. I spot an old Marin Mount Vision, a Raleigh Burner (replica, sadly), and Tim Gould’s old Peugeot from
1991 (yup, another replica).
Down at the bottom it’s even stranger – this is where bikes come to die. Hundreds more are clustered between the trees, some with components missing or snapped brake levers, most with a decade’s worth of rust and all in need of some love. There’s an old pump track down here too – the bikes look abandoned mid-lap like the fallout from an industrial accident.
“Everyone remembers having a bike as a kid, and the thought that there are kids out there without them just gets to people,” Mike says. “For me, having a bike was just as massive part of my childhood – building dodgy ramps in the street, jumping over your mates, that kind of stuff.”
Mike didn’t start out with the idea of building a charity that has now distributed more than 500 bikes in just 12 months, instead he wanted to get his grandkids something decent to ride. “I bought one on ebay for £2.50 and did it up,” he says.
If his family needed bikes but couldn’t afford them then surely others would be in the same situation, Mike reasoned. He used his Twitter account to ask for unwanted bikes, and donations started