Love Your Bike Portsmouth – This Sunday

Southsea Skatepark is the venue for the main Love Your Bike Portsmouth event from 10am-5pm. Limited quantities of goodie bags so to avoid being left out get there early.

It’s going to be an action packed day with Ben Wilson showcasing his bikes and welding on site. Death Spray Custom will be airbrushing bikes, Tokyo Fixed Gear have a mini shop, Gocycle will be offering demos of their bike and showcasing special custom editions, RAW Bamboo will be bringing a few of their bikes and the new Fixei range will also be unveiled.

There will be loads of workshops and offers of help with customisation from various people including Portsmouth Creative Movement, Stu Rodda, Ian and Adam Macpherson. Badger Press will be bringing a screen printing set-up so that you can design your own bags etc, The Caravan Gallery will be bringing their own eclectic mix of cycling photographs and Southsea Gallery will be selling artwork including some of the spoke card designs.

Bike Polo and BMX Demos and the winner of the Schools Competition will be announced.

To check out the full list visit – http://www.loveyourbikeportsmouth.co.uk/love/contributors

From 4pm head to Albert Road where Ian Parmiter will have an exhibition of Vintage Bikes with DJ Set and have your photograph taken on a penny farthing, ROKii Clothes will be announcing the winner of their bike and then head to Little Johnny Russell’s for free food at 6pm.

Look forward to seeing you all there.

Portsmouth Bike Polo

Bike Polo started in Ireland in 1891. Portsmouth University BA 3D Design student’s Ben MacKenzie and Savio Ku started a Bike Polo team in Portsmouth in 2009 but this year the team has grown to over 12 people. A team consists of up to 8 a side with no-more than 5 players on the pitch at any time. It was actually an Olympic Sport in 1908.

I was lucky enough to see them train at the D-Day Museum Car Park on Southsea Seafront where they train every Wednesday from 7pm. The team in these photographs were Phil Oldham, Savio Ku, Ben MacKenzie, Josie Applegate, Alex Woods, James Roberts, Jameel Hussien, James Davis, Kirsten Filippi, Josie Young and Hugh Gibbs. To contact them and join visit the Facebook page.

See a demo of Bike Polo at the Love Your Bike event on 30/05/10.

Love Albert Road Day 2010 Cancelled

You may have read in The News on Monday that this years Love Albert Road street festival won’t be going ahead.  Rising police costs are one of the main reasons and organisers say it has become too much for them to do on their own.  Hopes of a major sponsor or aid from the City Council haven’t seemed to arise this year so the event will not happen in late September as it has done for the past three years.  It’s a sad turn of events as it has been a hugely popular and enjoyable day for the people of Southsea in recent times however organisers say that they will be concentrating on smaller events throughout 2010 including involvement with Love Your Bike on May 30th before hopefully staging another Love Albert Road Day in 2011.

You can read Fran Duckett-Pike’s full story in The News by clicking here

Love Your Bike Portsmouth

Following on with more Claire Sambrook activity, you may have heard the whispers and nudges regarding the upcoming event Love Your Bike Portsmouth on 30th May. Claire has been working her knitted socks off getting this together with some seriously heavy local contributors including design aficionados ilovedust, Bored of Southsea, Ian Parmiter, Haslemere Cyles, PCM, Josie Young, Sifer Design, not to mentioned such amazing contributors from further afield like Ben Wilson and Toyko Fixed Gear to name a few, and of course our good selves at Strong Island.

“Bike culture is an important part of cycling and regaining the streets. Love Your Bike Portsmouth aims to encourage participants to fully embrace the possibilities of connecting with their bikes and explore the many ways that they can improve it’s appearance and design.

As part of a day event and showcase you will be offered the chance to ‘Customise Your Bike and in turn ‘Love Your Bike’.
Demonstrations will be staged by local and national artists and designers who will offer sessions in customisation and collaboration. International designer Ben Wilson will be welding bikes at the skatepark and also showcasing some of his work. There will be a wide selection of bikes and accessories available for purchase to suit all budgets. Local artists and designers will be involved with helping paint frames and customise bike parts. Does your bike need a make-over?

Watch out for our Love Your Bike custom tags around the city. If you have been tagged then please send your pics to us and also turn up at the event to showcase your bike or have it customised.”

Check out loveyourbikeportsmouth.co.uk and Facebook for much more info.

PRIMARY – Extended & Improved

We have some great news about our PRIMARY phonography exhibition (find out all the details here) that we can now announce:

- The deadline for submissions has now been extended to Sunday 4th March. We have had some incredible submissions but want to set aside more time to make the exhibition something really special.

- The competition is now open to up to 10 submissions from each individual. With the ability to capture many photos on your phone over the next two months we we want you to not feel restricted to just three. The same rules apply about the photos conforming to compositions using the primary colours though. If you have already submitted feel free to send more photos over as and when you please.

- The exhibition will be hosted by Albert Road’s own Bonzo Studio who are also partnering up with us in the creation of the exhibition space. More news on this soon!

- Finally, we will be running a competition as part of the exhibition where the best three photos submitted will win some incredible prizes. We will be announcing the prizes available very soon but got to say, these will be the best prize haul we have ever offered.

- We will be putting together a poster for the exhibition that will be on sale on the opening night. The poster will feature some of the best submissions and all profits from the sales will go to a local charity (details to follow soon). Due to this we need to say that any photos submitted to PRIMARY will involve you giving us permission to use them for commercial purposes, if you do not want your photo used in this way simply let us know via email.

Well, that is it for now! We really hope to drum up as much coverage locally for PRIMARY in the next couple of months so if you could Facebook/Tweet/+1 about the exhibition we would really appreciate it. We would love this exhibition to be a real reflection of the whole population of Portsmouth with everyone taking part and feeling involved.

It’s going to be a Strong Movember – Closed at £725

Righto chaps, it’s time to clean shave your boat race and get that mighty moustache on the grow in support of Movember for The Prostate Cancer Charity and the Institute of Cancer Research. For 30 days of November you can help support and raise awareness through selflessly parading your top lip for charity.

You can sign up yourself, as I’m sure many of you already have, or you can join the Strong Island team and seek out sponsorship as a team. Through the Strong Island Movember page you can ask people to join the group, make donations, upload photos and post updates via the MoSpace page, Facebook and Twitter.

Head over to www.mobro.co/StrongIsland if you would like to get involved and grow a Strong Moustache to help raise awareness, or simply head over to www.uk.movember.com and sign up to personally raise money.

The funds raised in the UK support the number one and two male specific cancers – prostate and testicular cancer. The funds raised are directed to programmes run directly by Movember and our men’s health partners, The Prostate Cancer Charity and the Institute of Cancer Research. Together, these channels work together to ensure that Movember funds are supporting a broad range of innovative, world-class programmes in line with our strategic goals in the areas of awareness and education, survivorship and research.

Poster: Tristan Savage