Blog - Edinburgh Festival of Cycling

#IWD2024 and #WorldBookDay

A celebration of International Women’s Day and World Book Day

As today is International Women’s Day and yesterday was World Book Day, we thought we would celebrate some of the fantastic women who have been a part of the festival over the years with a book grid.

Photo of a book grid showing the covers of books written by women who have been a part of the Edinburgh Festival of Cycling

The books were laid out in random order. From top left – Kate Rawles The Life Cycle, Sarah Outen Dare to Do, Jenny Tough Solo, Jenny Graham Coffee First, When The World, Rebecca Lowe Slow Road to Tehran, Jenny Tough Keep the Sea to the Right, Emily Chappell What Goes Around, Kate Rawles The Carbon Cycle, Emily Chappell Where There’s a Will, Juliana Buhring This Road I Ride, Ishbel Holmes Me, My Bike and a Street Dog Called Lucy, Shannon Galpin Mountain to Mountain, Emma Jones cover designer of the EdFoC printed programme 2019, Jooles Walker Back in the Frame, Lee Craigie Joining the Dots, Lee Craigie Other Ways to Win, Karen Darke Quest 79, Karen Darke Boundless, Tough Women an anthology edited by Jenny Tough, and Anna Hughes Eat, Sleep, Cycle.

There have been many, many, more wonderful women who have played a part in the Edinburgh Festival of Cycling over the last 12 years, but these are just the books that came to hand at EdFoC HQ this morning. And there will be many more to come, watch this space!

Call for events 2024

Call for events for the Edinburgh Festival of Cycling 2024

We are putting together the programme for the eighth Edinburgh Festival of Cycling (#EdFoC2024) and invite you to get involved. If you would like to run an event as part of the Festival, please get in touch. This year, EdFoC has been extended to include an extra weekend and runs from Friday 31st May to Sunday 9th 2024. We are open to suggestions of any types of events that fit within the aims of the Festival.

Unlike some cycling festivals, The Edinburgh Festival of Cycling doesn’t just revolve around the sports side of cycling (although we aim to cater for sports cycling in all its forms as well). There are so many sides to cycling – from transport to sport, from leisure activity to cultural icon – all of which the Festival sets out to celebrate, including a wide range of cultural, sporting and fun events for all ages across the city. Basically, if it involves wheels, pedals (although pedal-less balance bikes are also welcome) and human-powered cycling, or references these, we will consider it for inclusion.

If you would like to submit one or more events for inclusion, please use the form below. For informal enquiries, please send us an email via the form below. The closing date for the printed programme is 17:00 on Friday 22th March 2024, but we’d really appreciate earlier approaches  ;-).

Running any festival costs money and EdFoC is no different, so we have to charge an event listing fee. These fees are to help cover the costs of the programme production and festival promotion (in 2019 this cost us over £4,000). The fee level is the same for listing in the printed programme and on the website, or in the online programme only. If you charge people to take part in your event, the listing fee is £35 per event. If your event is free to take part in, the listing fee is £15 for each event.

EdFoC-event-booking-form-2024 and return it to us by e-mail (see below)


    EdFoC is on Mastodon

    This website has now joined the fediverse with ActivityPub, to broadcast a wider audience. So if you are on Mastodon or any other federated platform, you can now follow us at @edfoc@edfoc.org.uk. However, please note that the software running this automated feed is new and maybe a bit buggy.

    Something to note though, only new posts going forward will be available in the fediverse (i.e. after this one) and anyone who follows this site, will only see new posts we publish from that moment on. You will never see previously-published posts in your Home feed. This process is very similar to subscribing to a newsletter. If you subscribe to a newsletter, you will only receive future emails, but not the old archived ones.

    Hope this is of interest to at least some people. It is possible that in the future, that as more platforms join the fediverse, (Meta, the owner of Instagram and Threads, is talking about it) you will be able to follow from those too.

    EdFoC Needs You: The image is based on the famous recruiting poster, a moustachioed man with a peaked hat points out at the viewer. The words "EdFoC Needs YOU" are displayed below his face.

    We need you – do you want to be part of the team?

    We need you – do you want to be part of the team?

    If you are reading this, you may have noticed that the Edinburgh Festival of Cycling Ltd (or EdFoC to its friends) hasn’t run an entire festival since 2019. This has partly been due to things beyond our control, such as the global pandemic, but it has also been due to the team behind the Festival running out of steam.

    A bit of background – as can be seen from the About page, the company has a small number of directors (ideally, this should be a minimum of four, but this has slipped) and a few additional volunteers. None of the team are paid to date, and all the modest profits made from running the Festival have been ploughed back into running the Festival. If there were sufficient funds in the future, this could change.

    Who do we need?

    Currently, the company requires at least two new directors to maintain a quorum, and the Festival as a whole needs people with new ideas who are also willing to commit to turning those ideas into reality. The Festival must also find more funding sources; even before the pandemic, sponsorship was tight.

    Once we have got the Festival core team back to full strength, we will also need people who want to get involved but may not be able to commit a significant amount of time. We will have space for you, as there are always things that you could get involved with.

    Interested?

    If you are interested in helping the Festival get back on its feet, please send us a message via the contact form, briefly outlining what you can offer, your background, any specific skills, and what you would like to get out of being a part of the team. We will get back to you and arrange a meeting to discuss.

    We are 10, Happy Anniversary to us!

    We are 10, Happy Anniversary to us!

    The company that runs EdFoC, Edinburgh Festival of Cycling Ltd, was first incorporated on the 11th of February 2013. Since then, we have successfully run eight festivals, each more than a week long. We have been named as “One of the top 10 cycling festivals in Europe”, and had tremendous feedback from our supporters.

    For Sale Sold: Urban Arrow Family Cargo Bike

    For Sale Sold: Urban Arrow Family Cargo Bike

     

    The time has come to sell, our spare Urban Arrow Cargo Bike. At the time the bike was bought in September 2020, it was the highest specification available. These specs include: a Bosch Cargo Line motor, belt drive (for lower maintenance), Shimano Zee Disc Brakes, Lezyne Power E80 / Spanninga Plateo (front / rear lights), and 500Wh battery, with dual battery setup (please note: only one battery is included with the sale). Additional extras included in the sale are: floor mat, Box cover, rear rack, Bike parka, and security tracker.

    At the time of writing the bike has been ridden for 3048 Km with a total operating time of 327 hrs (service report available). This is a low mileage bike in good condition.

    The value of the bike when new was £6,500.

    As standard, the bike can carry two children or one adult, if you are looking for a cargo bike for freight use the bench seat can be removed, as can the box.

    The bike is also fitted with a GPS security tracker so that the owner can always know where the bike is. The new owner will be offered the opportunity to download the tracking app and take over the tracking of the bike (EdFoC will no longer track the bike once sold). Tracking is optional at €39.50 (~£35) per year.

    If you have any question, it is best to contact us by email.

    EdFoC Mini: We are back!

    EdFoC Mini: We are back!

    The Edinburgh Festival of Cycling 2022 is back, but not with the full 10-day festival, this will be a jam packed weekend of events to get EdFoC started again. The EdFoC Mini will take place over the weekend of 16th and 17th July 2022.

    Due to the global pandemic, we have been unable to run the internationally recognised traditional 10-day festival Edinburgh Festival of Cycling. Getting the full 10-day festival up and running takes six months of planning and hard work, given the uncertainty around COVID-19, we have decided this year just to run smaller pop-up events to get things going again. We are planning to bring back the full 10-day Edinburgh Festival of Cycling in 2023.

    If you are interested in getting involved, please get in touch.

    Edinburgh Festival of Cycling 2022

    Due to the current rapidly changing situation regarding the COVID-19 pandemic, it is very hard to plan a full ten-day festival of the sort we used to run before the pandemic started. Currently, we are looking at mainly running a series of pop-up events, mainly outdoors, and just publishing them on the calendar on our website. If you would like to add a pop-up event to our calendar, please let us know.

    We want to thank everyone who has supported us over the years, and we hope to be able to resume the full Edinburgh Festival of Cycling in its traditional format as soon as possible.

    We will update this website once we have further information.

    Cargo bike f̶o̶r̶ ̶s̶a̶l̶e̶ Sold

    For Sale Sold: Urban Arrow Family Cargo Bike

    The bike is now sold.

    Here is a wee video of the bike which was for sale

    The time has come to sell, our almost-two-year-old Urban Arrow Cargo Bike (note that the branding will be removed before the handover when the bike is sold). At the time the bike was bought in 2019 it was the highest specification available, it has a CX Bosch motor with a 500 W Hour battery, making it easy to climb the hills of Edinburgh.

    As standard, the bike can carry two children or one adult, if you are looking for a cargo bike for freight use the bench seat can be removed, as can the box.

    The bike has covered just under 4000 Km and the battery has had under 70 full charge cycles at the time of writing. The bike is also fitted with a GPS security tracker so that the owner can always know where the bike is. The new owner will be offered the opportunity to download the tracking app and take over the tracking of the bike (EdFoC will no longer track the bike once sold). Tracking is optional at €39.50 (~£33) per year.

    If you have any question, it is best to contact us by email.

    Edinburgh Bike Shops

    Edinburgh Bike Shops

    With the current ongoing Covid-19 crisis people are looking to the bicycle as a means of transport and for exercise, so we thought it would be useful to have a map of all the bike shops in Edinburgh some information about whether they are open during the crisis. Whilst we have don’t our best to ensure that this information is correct, we can not guarantee it is full up to date. Therefore, it is best to check with the individual bike shop that they are open before setting off to visit them.

    If you do find any errors or omissions please let us know.

    Edinburgh Festival of Cycling