Dirt Factory: Crowdfunding Launch Event

Founder Dan Makin with the Dirt Factory team

You see this big empty warehouse?

The site: a blank canvas for now, but you could help paint it with heaps of dirt!

Well, the team at Dirt Factory are aiming to turn it into the UK’s first indoor bike park. After three years of research and assembling a team of trail builders, construction managers, investors and so on, they’re almost ready. At 14:00 – 16:00 on Sunday the 31st of January, they’re hosting a crowdfunding launch event at Rise Manchester, Deansgate, Manchester, M3 4EN. You’ll be the first to see the video they’ve made for the campaign, and get to ask them questions about the plan. Unlike most crowdfunding campaigns, they’re using Crowdcube to seek investors rather than backers.

After a dark winter of mud mixed with occasionally riding BMX at the National Cycling Centre’s indoor track, an indoor bike park sounds like a brilliant idea to us. The planned facility will be in the Greater Manchester area, a visualisation of what it might look like is below, and you can find out more here.

A 3D render of potential Dirt Factory plans.

David Hayward

David started mountain biking in the 90’s, by which he means “Ineptly jumping a Saracen Kili Racer off anything available in a nearby industrial estate”. After growing up and living in some extremely flat places, David moved to Yorkshire specifically for the mountain biking. This felt like a horrible mistake at first, because the hills are so steep, but you get used to them pretty quickly. Previously, David trifled with road and BMX, but mountain bikes always won. He’s most at peace battering down a rough trail, quietly fixing everything that does to a bike, or trying to figure out if that one click of compression damping has made things marginally better or worse. The inept jumping continues to this day.