Interview Transcripts: Chris

Chris: 

Yeah so I’m Chris, I’ve been working with recycles for about three years; how did I get involved in recycles? I don’t know. [Laugh]. It was, it was kind of a natural affair I guess. When I came to Liverpool I basically realized I couldn’t afford these bus passes that people were dishing out to students at three-four hundred quid, so I realized, get on eBay, find myself a second hand bike, and get it [Laugh]. That took about a week and then realized I’d bought myself a second hand bike that was broken, so I realize that I was going to have to learn how to fix this broken second hand bike so I-er-I started… reading on the internet and looking around to see who could teach me and really luckily bumped in to this group of people who’d set up this bike project, erm, called Recycles, erm, and started going down to their workshop and was just amazed, like, it-it was brilliant; they were letting you go down, use their tools, work-work on your bike or do whatever you wanted to your bike and just s-s..yeah just let you get on and do it, erm, so yeah that’s how I ending up kind of getting involved with the group and then after a year or two kind of found [Whilst laughing briefly] myself in the, in the position where I was helping the thing go along - at first I thought I was a customer but they kind of encouraged me along the way to get involved, and more involved, and come to the meetings, and do all the good stuff and we ended up, like I ended up like, I felt part of the-the group and it was, yeah it was absolutely amazing yeah, and at end of it I had a bike that worked as well which is important to me. [Laughs, can also briefly hear woman laughing] So… yeah, I don’t know, about a year after I started kind of feeling involved. Erm, we were-were starting to get shifted out of the students union, erm, and, yeah, moved on to different places, so err, we… when we moved out there we collected all of our stuff which was… basically spread across a nightclub, this.. ah bit [Laugh], a massive building that used to be a nightclub and, err, we compacted into.. our friends shed, after compacting it into a van [while laughing] a few times. So yeah we, for a couple months we worked out of this shed which was probably about, yea-yeahh, about half the sixe of this room. Erm, yeah we got-got all the bikes we had, all the tools we had, all the bits we had, all the wheels we had, all the tires we had, chucked them in and then on-on a day we’d be working we’d pull them all out again one by one - it would maybe take an hour to get the place open - and then we’d work in it for an hour and fill the place up again. Erm, so…yeah… after that we got offered a space in this massive yard which, er, is where we’re working out of at the minute, and, err, and basically we saw more space as a good thing, and, this yard turns out to have a lot of these grade two listed buildings, erm, but it-its all dilapidated, its falling apart. Erm, we work every Saturday out of that yard in-in the open sky; we’ve built ourselves a shed, quarter of the size of this room, erm, to stuff as much of our stuff as we can into, but it just doesn’t work any more so… we are working at the minute, still doing like a bicycle recycling project, still tryna like help people like fix their bikes, teach them like what’s goin- like how it works, try to get people involved in the community sense of it, but at the same time we’re working in the background tryna find some money to get this site back into use which is… I think its important as well yeah… erm. Alongside that we do, we do a number of bike doctors, so we, you know, we go out into community markets or, these er… like this dry bar that Luke was talking about erm, and we, er, yeah basically once a month go to each one of these places so we end up pretty busy over the we- like over the month erm, going to these places and, like err, might be like, underprivileged places where people might not have a lot of money so couldn’t afford to take their bike to a… a bike shop to get it fixed, we try and help like sh- fi- fix something for them or show them how to fix it, erm just, yeah try to get them involved all the time. So we work just down-just down the road; there’s a community market called Granbury market which erm, yeah opens, yeah once a month over the s-summer, erm, and they did a winter one this year it’s amazing actually, we were all freezing, erm, erm yeah basically yeah we set up, the whole market’s going on, and we get hundreds of people just [Bonks mic] flowing with the bikes, bikes, bikes, bikes, families, some, some families bring four bikes [laugh] we try and do what we can for them but, yeah yeah, we err, yeah, its-its just great so its-its definitely like a massive community thing that’s like we still try to work on doing, yeah, its, yeah its just a great project all around.

You got any question for me? [Laugh, clapping in background]

Ryan:

How did your…

Chris:

How did I learn to ride a bike? [Laugh] you wa-you want to know how I learnt to [Laughing more, woman is laughing/talking in background] you do, you really do [more laughing] okay erm [Yet more raucous laughter]

I remember [Laughs again] when I was about four years old [Laughing] my mum got me on this bmx bike that was made for about an eight year old, big hard plastic seat, pushed me down this hill, just got me rolling, kept me going down the hill and I-I thought I was cycling, cycling, cycling, and, realized I was peddling backwards [Women quietly laughing in background], I was told I was peddling backwards about a year later.