Plans & Prospects 2023

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On the road If you’ve seen the OxBikes pre-loved bike depot here at college, which aims to address the city’s high demand for bikes and its termly bike waste problem, you’ll be pleased to learn that Wolfson DPhil student Pedr Charlesworth is one of the brains behind the operation. Here, he tells us how his global cycling adventures shaped his approach to the annual cycles of academia and work and his involvement in OxBikes. DPhil Materials Science, 2020 How reading The Moods of Future Joys by Alastair Humphreys in my first year of university shaped my direction My first cycling trip was when I was doing my undergraduate degree in Bristol. I was half-involved in the cycling team but more committed to my DJ-ing at the time - until I overheard a conversation on a bus between two mates talking about how one of them went cycling through Norway over the summer. I liked the idea, did some research, and settled on Sweden for a slightly less hilly adventure. On this trip, I read a book called The Moods of Future Joys by Alastair Humphreys about how the author rode around the world for four and a half years and never took a plane. At the time, I was on my first little three-week cycling holiday. That book started my cycling snowball and by the time I came to the end of my undergrad, I didn’t know if I wanted to go on to do a PhD anymore. I hadn’t found anything I was incredibly passionate about in chemistry, and I felt like I’d just be doing a PhD without any meaningful thought or direction. So I spent the third 14 year of my degree working, and teaching lectures in the mornings and evenings as part of a special course I was on, which meant I had enough money to travel for a little while. My idea was to try to ride a bike from London to Sydney in 12 months. It all got cut short because of COVID-19, but until that point I was very locked into a 12-month mindset, as many of us are through education and work. I thought if I was going to travel, I’d give myself a year. Everything was all blocked out and planned. But when I got about six months into that trip, my mindset really started to shift as I travelled through Central Asia. Meeting a kid called Jake from Montana in Khorog, Tajikistan Well into my travels by now, I was in the ‘stans, a congregation of mountains, stepped grassland and desert tucked between India, Russia and China. Overlanders, people who travel by car, motorbike or bike, come here with a partner or a few friends for a oncein-a-lifetime trip after a great deal of preparation and with all the right gear. It all revolves around a route called the Pamir Highway, which is part of the journey that people do to get to Mongolia. It was on this well-travelled route that I met 17-year-old Jake, who had spent the summer working on his parents’ farm before flying from Montana to Kyrgyzstan on his own. With only three previous motorbike rides under his lean teenage belt, he bought a bike from a Scottish guy at a market for $1,000 and decided to ride all the gnarliest routes without a care in the world. He was just a kid with a motorbike and no safety measures other than a spanner (which wasn’t even adjustable). When I asked him what he would do if something went wrong, he said he’d just figure it out. He’d ask for help, he’d find a hostel, he’d find a solution. And I just loved his mentality. Here we all were, with our expensive bikes, pre-planned routes and backup plans and there was Jake, saying he’d just figure it out. Maybe that’s a luxury only a 17 year-old boy can afford, but it really revitalised a feeling in me of just letting things be. When I came back to the UK, I appreciated so many things but I also had a different sense of this block-year university and grad scheme thinking we have. I fall straight back into it some ways when I’m here, but I do think that experience with Jake, and a few other moments on that trip, allow me to bring a different perspective to my life in this highly organised society that we live in. I feel less fear of the unexpected, more open to strangers and unpredictable
Student profile “As an entrepreneur, there’s a genuine fear of failing.” encounters. I found it such a healthy mindset to adopt while living in an incredibly privileged place, studying amongst amazing people, and just being safe day to day. When OxBikes took off I think that mentality is partly what I’ve tapped into to keep driving OxBikes forward. As an entrepreneur, there’s a genuine fear of failing. So again it’s about pushing past that. We’ve got to put ourselves in that position and just say why not? I got involved in OxBikes in my second year at Oxford. We provide love for bikes that get thrown away. Oxford is a very transient place, with people coming and going, needing bikes when they’re here and then wanting to get rid of them when the academic year is out. There’s apparently a tradition amongst leavers to ride their bike to the Radcliffe Camera on their last day in the city and just set it free because they know someone will take it. There’s a clear need in this city to organise the chaos around bikes, and when I joined OxBikes, all we had were a few bikes from Trinity College and we were just checking them over and selling them on. We built up slowly from there. We started to build a website with some makeshift code that made sure we weren’t selling duplicate bikes – that was the level at the time. We were running a few ads on Facebook and, next thing you know, I got a call from someone saying they’d seen an ad and wanted to invest. So then we wanted to buy 100 more bikes, which would triple our fleet at the time. We’d make sure they were in good functioning order then sell or rent them on. Then one day I was just sitting on the bus driving through London on the day of the marathon. I get a notification every time we make a rent or sale, and on this 10-minute bus journey, my phone was buzzing non-stop and I just couldn’t believe it. People were actually interested in this funky little website we’d made. It was just a case of pulling things together bit by bit until it really became something. Since then, we’ve been pitching at the Saïd Business School for more funding, and there’re are few different directions we want to go next. We want to get into more colleges and we’d like to get to Cambridge. I want it to be like the AirBnB of bicycles. When you travel to Amsterdam or Copenhagen, you could rent a bike from someone who lives there. It’s ideas like this that make you wonder, why hasn’t anyone done this sooner? 15
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