Interesting use of old bicycle frames

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Found this whilst looking for something else.

A photograph survives of the first workshop built by Thomas Smithies Taylor and his brother William when they were aged twelve and fourteen. With savings from their pocket money, the boys purchased cement and, collecting brick ends and stones, succeeded in constructing a workshop in a passage way between the wall of their father’s house in Willesden and a garden wall . The concrete walls were reinforced with old bicycle frames.

This is the mid 1880's were talking about, here:ohmy:
 

twentysix by twentyfive

Clinging on tightly
Location
Over the Hill
Are you looking for those walls? To dis-inter those frames? :laugh:
 
OP
OP
Hilldodger

Hilldodger

Guru
Location
sunny Leicester
I wish, but the wall was knocked down in the 30's:sad:

There's a local legend around the Leicestershire about a builder who bricked a load of bikes up in an old chimney breast/fireplace in a large country houses during the 1920's.
 

Beardie

Well-Known Member
Hilldodger said:
The concrete walls were reinforced with old bicycle frames.

This is the mid 1880's were talking about, here.

Interesting, as it shows that people were chucking bikes away even back then, even though a bike would have been humungously expensive. Maybe people were ditching their old high-wheelers in favour of the new Rover Safety.
 

twentysix by twentyfive

Clinging on tightly
Location
Over the Hill
Hilldodger said:
I wish, but the wall was knocked down in the 30's:sad:

There's a local legend around the Leicestershire about a builder who bricked a load of bikes up in an old chimney breast/fireplace in a large country houses during the 1920's.


So off round all the likely houses with metal detector you go. ;)
 
In about 1978 the landlord of "The Hole int' Wall" pub in Bowness sent the previous landlord's collection of antique cycles, including a very early Rover (no proper seat tube) and several Penny Farthings amongst others for scrap.
 
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