Since 2018, Paul Wilcox has travelled the length and breadth of Derbyshire, collecting clapped-out and rusting bicycles and lovingly restoring them to full health. He pushes leaflets through people’s doors, urging them to call him if they have any bikes knocking around their homes that are no longer used.
When he started, he wasn’t sure how popular it would be. But it quickly took off says Wilcox, a 67-year-old from the village of Breaston, between Derby and Nottingham. “People kept ringing me and saying, ‘we have bikes here’, and it snowballed.”
Wilcox, who found second life as an amateur bike mechanic after retiring from his car sales business in 2018, restores old bikes to raise funds for Treetops, a local hospice. He was shocked when he raised his first grand: “I couldn’t believe we’d reached £1,000 from selling secondhand bikes”. That was only the beginning. Over the years, Pushbike Paul, as he’s known to the staff at Treetops, has raised nearly £60,000 through the sale of over a thousand bikes.
“Paul has made the bike scheme a part of his life, putting smiles on the faces of those who can’t afford a new bike, knowing the proceeds are helping those who need it the most,” says Adela Appleby, head of community relationships at the hospice.
Wilcox has longstanding ties to Treetops, a hospice that provides care and emotionally support to terminally ill people: his father worked there as a volunteer gardener until he was 90. “There’s a picture of him in the local paper,” Wilcox says proudly. His wife also volunteered at the hospice for more than a decade, driving the minibus for guests.
“They give such important service to the local community in their final days,” says Wilcox. “We know loads of friends and neighbours who’ve been looked after by them.”
Despite his support, Wilcox rarely ventures into the hospice. “I hate to think of my own mortality,” he says. “It’s a bit too early for that, hopefully.”
Bicycle maintenance is something that Wilcox has done since childhood. He grew up on a council estate in Nottingham. His first bicycle was a secondhand Raleigh that his parents bought from a neighbour. “It weighed a ton and had rod brakes,” says Wilcox. “It was so heavy. You almost had to push it up hills.” He’d cycle it to and from school, a mile each way. If anything went wrong, Wilcox repaired it himself. “I always enjoyed fiddling with it,” he says. “Us kids were always fixing bikes for other people.”
To this day, he enjoys a challenge. “If something is broken, I want to repair it, not buy a new one. Today everything is just throwaway – no one ever wants to repair anything. If a car breaks down you fit a new part. Whereas we’d always take things to pieces, and repair them.”
Wilcox receives a daily delivery of up to seven bikes, dropped off to his home by fellow volunteers, and starts work on them in his garden. Sometimes he’ll fix five or six in a day. “On an average week, it’s bikes, bikes and more bikes,” he says.
He rarely struggles to repair a bike, but if he does, “we take as many bits off them as we can retrieve, and scrap the rest.” They typically sell for about £50, but some go for as little as £25. The most expensive bike he’s ever resold was £400. Wilcox is never tempted to keep any of them for himself. “I don’t ride a special bike,” he says. “Just a run of the mill mountain bike which I’ve had for years.”
His bicycle restoration efforts kicked up a gear in 2020. “When lockdown hit,” he says, the hospice was “massively underfunded, because all the charity shops had to close.” Wilcox upped his efforts to help claw back the much-needed funds. But despite all the bikes that come to him, he never gets tired of it. “It’s silly really,” he says. “It’s not like work.”
When asked what he would like for his Guardian angel treat, Wilcox initially suggests getting someone to sort out his will, before “I go bongaloo.” But when I say that might be a bit morbid, he tells me that he’s a lifelong Formula One fan – he’s camped out at Silverstone to watch the British Grand Prix, and hardly ever misses a race on TV. It would be a dream to see how a Formula One car gets made, he tells me.
Mercedes offers Wilcox and a friend a personalised tour of their UK headquarters and factory in Bracknell, and on a sunny June morning, he sees where the magic happens.
We speak a few days after his visit. “I’m still buzzing from it now,” he says. “God. Where to start?” Wilcox saw how the cars are built, the bodywork up close, and the gearbox. “The tech is mindblowing,” he says, amazed by how the Mercedes team works to measurements less than the width of a human hair. “It was an unbelievable day,” the amateur mechanic says. “I will remember it for the rest of my life.”
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Email us – with their permission – and suggest a treat at guardian.angel@theguardian.com
