the history of Leicester Wheels for All. 

Before LWFA – 2000-2011

The most innovative cycling organisation around the turn of the century anywhere in the UK could well have been Cyclemagic, of Friday Street, Leicester.  A few LWFA volunteers and session leaders were involved in this earlier project.  Cyclemagic had innovative mechanical skills which saw the construction in-house of many interesting cycles. Cyclemagic ceased to exist in 2011. Its demise was a source of regret for many people in Leicester, but it had paved the way for what was to become LWFA.

Leicester Wheels for All goes it alone, 2016 to date

We came into existence as an independent charity [to be precise, a charitable incorporated organisation, or CIO] on 18 September 2016. We were, and still are grateful to the city council for their support, but we wanted to take responsibility for ourselves. This involved a steep learning curve! We were able to use the cycles bought by the city council on the basis of an informal loan, but apart from that we had to start from scratch and learn everything "on the hoof".  We had no corporate insurance, no base, save for a lock-up garage provided by the council, and no cycles of our own.  

The beginning was tough.  We took all the help we could get from the council which booked us for a few school holiday events.  We continued our association with Braunstone Leisure Centre, scraping the money together as best we could.  We had no policies, no risk-handling arrangements, no qualification standards for session leaders, no training and no safeguarding officer. We also had no transport.  The council provided a van for the few city events that we did.

Slowly, on the back of these events we came up with a programme of commercially funded activities to add to Braunstone.   We negotiated terms for each event and built up to a programme of events that has increased year on year – apart from the Covid period, when we had to cease all operations for around 12 months in total.

We negotiated our first commercial insurance policy in 2017. We also started a programme of planned preventative maintenance.  It was a struggle - our overheads were increasing and we had no plan to assure covering them with income.  We provided training for session leaders, and decided from the start that we would operate a mix of paid (self employed) session leaders and unpaid volunteers. Steadily we built a commercial model which survives to this day. We cover our outgoings and assure that our overheads are recovered within our event price.  

We managed to secure a permanent base for ourselves and our machines by persuading the council to allow us to place a shipping container at Saffron Lane athletics stadium, and to use the track for our events. 

We also had a stroke of good fortune.  The council officer responsible for Sport and Leisure approached us when we were at our shipping container and asked "Would you like to occupy the equipment shed at the back of the stadium?".  Cautiously we probed - how much would it cost, how would we be liable for the building, etc etc.

To cut a long story short, we ended up in our current accommodation, with space to store as many cycles as we were ever likely to need! This was transforming. A secure base adjacent to a high-quality running area was a dream come true.  

Shortly afterwards, we purchased our own van. We always felt that outreach events were the way forward, and had been hiring a van to take us to events around the city and council. This was a major step for us though – not just the purchase cost, but the running costs, maintenance and, most important, where to store it. It was at this point that Peter Simmonds decided to show that he really was a visionary – he waved aside all objections, managed to get a grant to cover the purchase cost, and turned up at the athletics stadium one day with a Luton van! As for storage – initially it was parked on his drive, then at a caravan store 15 miles out of town, before Peter's networking skills secured us a permanent parking space behind locked gates at the Glenfield hospital.

It was obvious from the beginning that we were meeting a real need within the city and county for all-ability cycling. Through a mixture of grants and paid-for events, we have now (2023) reached the point where we are on track to provide some 150 events a year, with an attendance figure in excess of 5,000. Our fleet now numbers over 30 machines, a mixture of trikes, hand cycles, side by side tandems, recumbents, wheelchair platforms and more. Our clients have ranged in age from four to 104. We are well-placed, we believe, to carry on doing what we do for many years to come.