As some people know, I was a founder member of the Recycles Cooperative
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Two novel ventures in Edinburgh promote bicycles as an important mode of transport within the city. Friends of the Earth have been running a bicycle workshop on Sunday evenings in Drummond Street, and Recycles, a workers cooperative, will be opening a shop on 1 August at 3 West Crosscauseway.
Recycles who aim to promote bikes generally will be selling second hand bikes and hope to provide a good repair service, carrying a range of spares that other shops don't stock. Chris Hill, one of the members of the cooperative, said that whilst Recycles would not be selling new bikes initially they would be prepared to advise people on the purchase of new cycles, and hoped that the shop would be much more helpful towards its customers than the commercial cycle shops are at the moment. The shop will be open from 10 am to 6 pm six days a week.
The Friends of the Earth initiative is the Community Bicycle Workshop on Sunday evenings held in the basement of 27 Drummond Street. This workshop is open to anyone and seemes to have grown into something more than just Friends of the Earth. It doesn't compete with the bicycle shops in any way but concentrates on the Simple operations of maintenance and bicycle care that the shops are not equipped to do. Two of the organisers Pete White and Mike Sweatman hope that the workshop will grow into a centre for the cycling community in Edinburgh which will then take up some of the wider issues affecting cyclists in the city. They certainly are looking much more deeply into the whole philosophy of transportina city and the lack of provision made by the Council for cyclists.
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City Lynx July 1977 (Edinburgh’s new ‘listings’ magazine)
Mike Sweatman was also a founder member. He worked at MacDonalds (the bike shop in a Danny MacAskill video) before joining the Coop in 1978 and continued for decades
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