Back after a short lockdown-related break, this year’s Glasgow Women on Wheels Cycle Festival will be bigger and better than ever!
The festival is running everyday in September and offers free events and activities for women and non-binary people. These include talks, screenings, led rides, lessons, bikepacking demonstrations, audience discussions and yoga sessions. You’ll be able to try BMX, mountain biking and track cycling at specialist venues. The festival also includes a launch of our new Glasgow women of colour cycling group! Our events are catered for a variety of cycling experience levels, so whether you’re a complete beginner or you’ve been riding for years, we have an event suited for you.
We’ll kick off the festival with a cycling parade from our West to our South hub wearing our festival colour, golden yellow! When we arrive, we’ll celebrate with music, food, drinks and film screenings to get ourselves ready for the month ahead.
This year, we really want to highlight how far cycling can take you. A range of champion cyclists will join us for the festival to tell us about how they first started cycling and how it’s changed their lives. At our festival launch parade and party, we’ll share a welcome video from Shanaze Reade, a former British BMX racer and track cyclist. On 17th September, we’ll host an online talk and Q&A with cycling record holder and leadership & goals coach Monika Sattler and on 23rd an online talk with paralympic cyclist Karen Darke.
We first started GWOW Cycle Festival in 2019 to inspire women to incorporate cycling into daily their lives and reduce barriers to cycling. In 2019, over 1,000 women attended the festival and every one of them said that the festival encouraged them to cycle more often!
Not only is taking part in the festival a great opportunity to explore cycling as a social activity and mode of transport, it’ll help you build confidence and reduce your carbon footprint too.
We’re championing women and non-binary people at every stage of this festival, so our photographers, caterers and even t-shirt printers are all local women and non-binary people too!
If you’d like to try something new, meet some more people, explore a new area or build new skills, make sure to check out our programme.
The Glasgow Women on Wheels festival is programmed in partnership between Bike for Good and Scottish Cycling, and being part-funded by Glasgow Life to celebrate two years until Glasgow hosts the 2023 UCI Cycling World Championships.