Those of you who have known us a little longer will know that when we moved in and setup camp in the barn at Kirkley, it wasn’t exactly ready for us! But thanks to The National Lottery we were able to access capital sufficient to get us established with our first decent sized workshop and storage base. Before this we were pretty much completely mobile apart from a small storage room at the John Willie Sams Community Centre in Dudley.
We started moving into the barn almost 2 years to date back in November 2018. I wrote a few blogs detailing the work involved and the progress being made through the winter months of 2018/19. The images below captures the starting point. The whole story, as it developed can be seen in my previous blogs.
As you know we built our workshop and made the absolute most of what we had and in the meantime we built and developed our team and our customer base to the point where we needed more space and better facilities that simply were not available at Kirkley.
So we leave Kirkley and the barn in a better shape than it was when we arrived, but back to the simple life of being a barn. Who knows for what or how it will be used next.
So 2 weeks in at our new HQ in Benton and we are definitely settling in. A customer commented that it looked like we’d been there for ages already. I’m not sure that was a good thing or not but it seemed a nice thing to say as we continue to create an interesting AND welcoming and for some a little intriguing space of work, discussion and friendly bike chat.
Thanks to all our customers who have already dropped in at Benton HQ to say hello or to drop bikes off or pick them up. Your continued support is much appreciated particularly as the uncertainty about Covid-19 restrictions continues to impact the cycling activity programmes we would normally be running alongside the Workshop.
Don’t forget for anything cycling related we are always happy to chat, on the phone, face2face or if you prefer email or social media.
And finally for today, it’s time to winterise those bikes! Check tyres, pads and sort mudguards and lights, if you haven’t already!
