The 2021 Cycle Touring Festival programme is detailed below.
Everything was free at the virtual festival. We didn’t want cost to be a barrier to participation and just wanted to do something to make pandemic life a bit more interesting for everyone.
We asked for donations from those who are able to give something, to help cover our overheads. The festival is non-profit and organised by volunteers.
Recordings of 2021 festival talks
Recordings of many live talks from the 2021 Virtual Cycle Touring Festival are now available on our Facebook group (under Media – Videos).
We are also uploading most talks to our CTF YouTube channel. It will take some time to get them all up online so do subscribe for updates.
We’re afraid that not all talks will be available to watch on Facebook and/or YouTube. If you don’t see one, then I’m afraid you missed out – sorry!
Event Listing
Can’t make a live event? Most events are available to watch afterwards on our Facebook page. See the FAQ for more details…
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Speakers
Below is a list of all the speakers at the virtual Cycle Touring Festival 2021. Huge thanks to them all for giving up their time.
fri12febAll Daysun21Cycle Touring Festival 2021(All Day)(GMT+00:00) View in my time
Speakers for this event
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Adam Hugill
Adam Hugill
After spending 8 years in the British Army, Adam Hugill left the UK in 2018 to travel the world by bike. During his 20,000km journey, he made videos for his YouTube channel (YouTube.com/AdamHugill) where he documented his journey. His channel has over 17k subscribers and 1.4 million views. Adam now lives in North Yorkshire and still makes videos about cycle touring, running and the outdoors.
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Alice Lemkes
Alice Lemkes
Alice accelerated from commuter to cargo bike courier to homeless bikepacker in a short time after a series of books and blogs confirmed her gut feeling that there was more to living than panel carpet, panel ceiling, tubs of Nescafé, and local authority bureaucracy. Her first existential tour to Serbia in the middle of winter without a navigation aid has left her poor toes with life long damage. Nevertheless she persisted, and spends almost all free time (which is a lot as a phd student) on adventures alone and with friends seeking to cultivate more connected ways of being in the world. Easily convinced by even the silliest of plans, most latterly the Resolution Race.
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Alice McNeil
Alice McNeil
Adventure Pedlars
Alice is a Registered Yoga Teacher, Chartered Physiotherapist and Mindfulness Teacher with a background in Outdoor Learning and a love of adventure.
Adventure Pedlars
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Allysse Riordan
Allysse Riordan
Allysse is an image maker, a sound artist, a writer, and a microaventurer - not necessarily in that order. She explores the UK (mostly) on foot or on two wheels at a speed always slower than guidebooks and GPS advertise. In 2016, she embarked on a cycle tour through Spain and (mostly) Portugal, during which time she recorded a myriad of sounds and captured far too many photos. In general, Allysse enjoys pottering about, sleeping in random fields, and capturing her journeys with a mixture of cameras, notebooks, and microphones.
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Andrew Sykes
Andrew Sykes
Andrew Sykes was a mild-mannered secondary school teacher of French when, in the summer of 2010, he decided to get on his bike and cycle to visit a friend in southern Italy. He wrote the popular cycling travelogue ‘Crossing Europe on a Bike Called Reggie‘ based upon his experiences as a naive touring cyclist and has published two more books since. He now produces The Cycling Europe Podcast, has made several films about his more recent two-wheeled adventures and has replaced Reggie with Wanda. He is still dreaming of cycling the length of Japan and writing more books…
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Anna Hughes
Anna Hughes
Anna is an environmental campaigner, author and cyclist. She is the Director of Flight Free UK and has written a number of books about cycling.
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Caitlin Bartlett
Caitlin Bartlett
Broken Spoke
Caitlin really likes creating open spaces for people to learn and ask questions. She works as one of the coordinators, and as a cycle mechanic and teacher, at Broken Spoke Bike Co-op — a community cycling project based in Oxford.
Broken Spoke
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Caroline Burrows
Caroline Burrows
#CyclePoet
Caroline Burrows of VerseCycle writes and performs short stories and poetry, which are often about cycling, but sometimes about love and heartbreak, or depression and anxiety. Her work can be found on YouTube/Facebook/IG/Twitter: VerseCycle. You can hear Caroline speak in her talk entitled Bristol Bike Bard on Saturday 12 February at 3pm.
URL https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCNfagvsYi3w_p-Un63KgS_A
#CyclePoet
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Cass Gilbert
Cass Gilbert
Cass Gilbert has over twenty years of bicycle touring under his belt. He's run a successful guiding business in the Indian Himalaya, freelanced for a number of bike and travel publications in the UK, traversed the length of Asia and the Middle East on two wheels, bikepacked his way around the American South West, and ridden dirt roads from Alaska to Patagonia. Several of his more recent adventures have been with his son.
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Catherine Dixon
TandemWOW
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Catherine Dunn
Catherine Dunn
Catherine is a professional filmmaker, whose work focuses primarily on issues around sustainability and the climate crisis. She also works in outdoor learning and creative industries associated with sustainability. But most of all, Catherine loves riding her bike.
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Chris Leakey
Chris Leakey
Bambino Biking
Chris loves cycling for every day transport and leisure. He started cycle touring at University in 2003. In 2009 Chris and girlfriend, now wife, Liz spent 2.5 years on a cycling trip between NZ and UK, completing about 10,000 miles by bike. Now with a family of two kids, Chris cycles most places in Manchester with his kids and has started a company called Bambino Biking that helps people get out cycling with their children. Offering trial and advice sessions in local parks, hire and sales of cycling equipment. Chris and his family have completed several cycling adventures together, including ten days in the Netherlands, cycling Hadrian's Wall and more.
Bambino Biking
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Clare Cottet
Clare Cottet
docgonewild
Clare is an expedition medic, travel blogger and seasoned traveller. Co-creator of recent adventure film Pamir to Karakoram along with her husband Antoine, Clare loves to share her experiences of travelling the world by bicycle. Her aim is to inspire others to get out there and have their own adventures.
docgonewild
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Dan Joyce
Dan Joyce
Cycle magazine
Dan Joyce is the editor of Cycle, the magazine of Cycling UK (formerly CTC). He’s been a cycling journalist since 1991 and has probably published – and rejected – more touring articles than any other editor. He’s also written touring articles for other cycling magazines and the national press.
Cycle magazine
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Doris Fox
Doris Fox
Doris Fox is an Elder from the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam) Nation, a traditional territory currently called Vancouver. Doris shares her gifts and wisdom as an Elder and healer on several advisory boards, committees, health clinics,and Elders Circles across Vancouver. She teaches various traditional arts and crafts such as traditional Salish Weaving, Cedar-bark Weaving and beading, and is an artist and clothing designer.
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Ed & Charly March-Shawcross
Ed & Charly March-Shawcross
Ed, Charly, Izzy and Will have been cycle touring together since Izzy was born and before Will had been thought of. They love spending time together outdoors, cycling, climbing, running and playing. They have taken lots cycle touring holidays in Europe and then in 2018 Ed and Charly resigned from their jobs and took to the road on ‘The Big Trip’, through northern Europe and then Patagonia. They returned from their adventures at the start of May but ‘The Big Trip 2’ is already being planned.
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Eleanor Jaskowska
Eleanor Jaskowska
Eleanor is a Welsh lass living in Bristol. She’s always ridden a bike to get around but really discovered two weels as a way of exploring and discovering new places when she was procrastinating on her PhD thesis. She’s dabbled in everything from touring around Scotland to racing across Europe and last year rode Paris-Brest-Paris on a fixed gear so has developed an eagle eye for elevation profiles!
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Harri Symes & Oli K-H
Harri Symes & Oli K-H
Thighs of Steel
Harri and Oli have been organising and riding on Thighs of Steel together for 5 years. They met riding from Lands End to John O'Groats in 2015, caught the cycle touring bug and decided to squish it together with their other passion, trying to make the world a little bit kinder and fairer. In the 5 years of working and touring together they have never lived in the same place, other than when they're on the road with 15 other sweaty cyclists. They started off barely owning cycling shorts, and just about being able to change an inner tube, but through the amazing community that has grown from Thighs they have learnt that clip ins are awesome and at least how to bodge a bike back together to limp on to the next bike shop.
Thighs of Steel
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Harriet Pike
Harriet Pike
Harriet and Neil Pike traded backpacks for bikes in 2008 and soon discovered the joy of using pedal power to get high. They’ve sought out mountain routes ever since, exploring Andean mine roads and pushing their Surlys over mountain passes in Ladakh. They are happiest when cycling to and hiking up big volcanoes on the Puna de Atacama. Having settled in Bristol, they updated Trailblazer’s Adventure Cycle-Touring Handbook.
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Inês Rahtz
Inês Rahtz
Broken Spoke
Inês loves going on adventures and some of the best have been on her bike. She works at Broken Spoke Bike Co-op, is desperate to see more women fixing bikes and loves inviting people into cycling spaces who might not think of themselves as ‘cyclists’.
Broken Spoke
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Isla Rowntree
Islabikes
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Jack Thurston
Jack Thurston
Lost Lanes
Jack began has been exploring the British countryside ever since he set up a school cycle touring club as a way to avoid having to kick a ball around a muddy playing field. He is the author of the bestselling Lost Lanes series of cycling guidebooks and has written about cycling for The Sunday Times, The Guardian, Daily Telegraph, Rouleur and all the main cycling magazines. In 2004 he started presenting The Bike Show, a cycling radio show on London's art-radio station Resonance FM. It's now podcast and has had more than 5 million downloads. He lives in Abergavenny, on the edge of the Black Mountains in Wales and is gently introducing his two children (aged 6 and 4) to the pleasures of travelling by bike.
Lost Lanes
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Jenny Graham
The Adventure Syndicate
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Jeremy & Louise Clines
Jeremy & Louise Clines
We are Jeremy, Louise, Esther and Nathaniel. We’re a car-free family that loves to travel. Happiest taking off on our bicycles with our camping gear in tow, we also use trains and ferries to boost us along the way. Our lifestyle aims to be as eco-aware as possible yet there are compromises the whole time. In the last year we have enjoyed a five week trip overland through the Netherlands and Germany to Finland by bike, ferry and train as well as cycling from Liverpool to Sheffield on the Trans Pennine Trail during a chilly October half-term.
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Julian Sayarer
Julian Sayarer
Julian is best known in cycling for his 18,000-mile world record circumnavigation. Set in 2009 and in opposition to a record endorsing big finance, his book Life Cycles tells a story of globalisation by the roadside, and is an account of the political spirit of life by bicycle. He has cycled a number of times across Britain and Europe, writing roadside politics for New Statesman, Guardian, LRB and others.
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Kajsa Tylen
Kajsa Tylen
In 2016, Kajsa Tylen spent 365 days on a bicycle, in a successful attempt to set a new Guinness World Record for the furthest distance cycled in a year by a woman. She continues to ride regularly, and as the founder of Sweat Pledge is on a mission to get adults active and to feel good about themselves.
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Karen Gee
Karen Gee
Cycle Sprog
Karen is the founder and editor of the popular Cycle Sprog website, the go-to resource for anyone looking for information about family cycling.
Cycle Sprog
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Kate Rawles
Kate Rawles
Kate is passionate about using adventurous journeys to raise awareness and inspire action on our major environmental challenges. She has recently returned from The Life Cycle: Colombia to Cape Horn by bamboo bike, exploring biodiversity loss. A former lecturer in environmental philosophy, Kate set up Outdoor Philosophy to explore big questions about human/nature relations in nature rather than lecture theatres. In 2006, she cycled from Texas to Alaska along the spine of the Rockies exploring climate change. Her book about this journey, The Carbon Cycle; Crossing the Great Divide, was shortlisted for the Banff Mountain Festival Adventure Travel Award, 2012. Other ‘adventure plus’ journeys include the Gyre to Gaia ocean plastic pollution sailing voyage with Pangaea Exploration.
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Laura Moss
Laura Moss
Cycle Touring Festival organiser
Laura is the festival organiser. During 2013-4, she completed a 16 month, 13,000 mile cycle around the world through 27 different countries. Elsewhere she has crossed the Wahiba Sands desert on foot, walked across Patagonia and run the length of every London Underground Tube line. Laura was previously a director of The Adventure Syndicate, a collective of female cyclists who aim inspire, encourage and enable more women and girls to get into cycling. Laura will open the festival in Welcome to the festival: intro and virtual social on Saturday 12 February at 10am.
Cycle Touring Festival organiser
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Lee Craigie
Lee Craigie
The Adventure Syndicate
Lee Craigie raced XC Mountain Bike for Scotland in the 2014 Commonwealth Games and for GB in World and European Championships. She has forced her way through bog and over high cols all over the Scottish Highlands and the French Alps including riding fully self supported off road on a Fatbike from Geneva to Nice. Lee has also completed the Highland Trail 550 and Tour Divide races. As well as riding her bike, Lee is also a director of The Adventure Syndicate – which aims to encourage an enable women and girls to challenge themselves – and has re-engaged countless young people who have been excluded from school through Cycletherapy, a mountain bike project in Scotland.
The Adventure Syndicate
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Libby Bowles
Libby Bowles
Having spent 6 years working underwater with the world’s largest sharks, rays and turtles, Libby has witnessed the impact of humans on the marine environment. She mixes a love of marine conservation and education, accepting a pupil’s challenge to take action, on a homemade bamboo bike. Libby is back in the UK after cycling in Australia, New Zealand and southern Africa. She continues her mission with a rather unusual new sidekick.
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Lilith Cooper & Abi Melton
Lilith Cooper & Abi Melton
Gears for Queers
Lilith (they/them) and Abi (she/her) are a queer couple who, after wobbling off on their first cycle tour in 2016 clutching a Google Maps print out, have never looked back. Together they help run the Edinburgh Zine Library and when they aren’t riding bikes, or in Lilith’s case trying to convince Fife College students to ride theirs, they are making zines and running community art workshops. Their first book ‘Gears for Queers’ was published in June 2020. They live in Kirkcaldy, Fife.
Gears for Queers
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Markus Stitz
Markus Stitz
Bikepacking Scotland
Markus Stitz is an German-born route designer, filmmaker, photographer and writer, based in Edinburgh, Scotland. He caught the adventure bug while living in New Zealand for two years and has explored Britain extensively since he moved here in 2009. After cycling 34,000km around the world on a singlespeed mountain bike he founded Bikepacking Scotland and has worked across Scotland, designing gravel and bikepacking routes for Wild About Argyll, Perthshire Gravel, Go East Lothian and the Cateran Ecomuseum. He is an ultra-endurance racer, with three successful finishes of the Highland Trail 550, Silk Road Mountain Race and Atlas Mountain Race. Markus writes for a wide variety of magazines and online publications including Singletrack, Cycling UK, Cranked, Cyclingtips and Yellow Jersey. Great Gravel Rides Britain is his first book. markusstitz.com bikepackingscotland.com You can hear Markus speak in his talk entitled Big Rides: Gravel & Mountain Biking routes in Britain on Thursday 17 February at 8pm.
Bikepacking Scotland
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Mike Elm
Mike Elm
New Story Ride
Mike has spent the best part of the last decade working on tackling the ecological and climate crisis in various jobs in Scotland. He is a fan of journeys by bike, train (including getting the train from Edinburgh to China), the occasional bus or boat, and has been flight-free since 2015. Other interests include snorkelling, ping pong and puns. After his adventure to China, he began the New Story Ride a bikepacking climate 'adventurism' journey to Mongolia, twinned with Rosie Watson's New Story Run. The New Story Ride is by far his longest ever cycle so far, although it's currently paused by the 'you know what'.
New Story Ride
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Neil Pike
Neil Pike
Harriet and Neil Pike traded backpacks for bikes in 2008 and soon discovered the joy of using pedal power to get high. They’ve sought out mountain routes ever since, exploring Andean mine roads and pushing their Surlys over mountain passes in Ladakh. They are happiest when cycling to and hiking up big volcanoes on the Puna de Atacama. Having settled in Bristol, they updated Trailblazer’s Adventure Cycle-Touring Handbook.
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Paul Cheese
Paul Cheese
The Big Record
Paul Cheese is a musician, producer and cyclist from Kent, UK. He is a forerunner in creating music from found sound and recording in unusual places using the natural reverb to influence the sound, usually discovered on cycling missions carrying recording equipment and instruments. Whilst on the hunt for inspirational locations, Paul has written and recorded music in locations around the world and in every region of the UK. On the tops of mountains, to deep underground, old places, new places and even underwater, from pill boxes to ice caves, the Australian bush to the Grand Canyon… His solo albums have been recorded on epic cycling trips across the UK and Europe whereby he carried 45 kg of recording equipment and instruments over 14000 miles. As a musician, Paul has toured extensively throughout the UK and Europe and has appeared on Channel 4, BBC and ITV as well as featuring on local BBC radio in all regions of the UK. Paul has also been a guest speaker for TEDx and has been commissioned by the BBC to create many pieces of music, one of which was for the Turner Contemporary Gallery.
The Big Record
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Pete McNeil
Pete McNeil
Adventure Pedlars
Pete is a bike adventurer, racer, qualified guide and expedition leader of unparalleled experience. Back in 2012, Pete and his wife, Alife, set out from the Peak District on a ‘honeymoon bike ride’. Two years, 22 countries and 20,000km later they showed up in New Zealand with a fresh perspective on love, life, riding bikes, sleeping outside, talking to strangers and pretty much everything that happens in the places in between destinations.
Adventure Pedlars
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Peter Gostelow
Peter Gostelow
Peter is an English language teacher whose bicycle adventures have taken him through over 70 countries – including cycling from Japan-UK and UK-South Africa. Between 2015-2016 he rode from East Africa to the Arabian Peninsula. You can hear Peter speak in the talk Stay Charged while Touring - Dynamos, Batteries, and Solar on Sunday 19 February at 12pm.
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Rachael Marsden
TandemWOW
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Rich Seipp
Rich Seipp
Father and son duo, Rich and Tom, started riding together when Tom was 5 years old, and over the years together they’ve ridden 22,000 miles. Tom’s first big ride took over 8 hours. He rode 35 miles. He was 5 years old. Together they have ridden across countries. They’ve Everested climbs and are veterans of the 24 hour Strathpuffer. I don’t think there are many people who have ridden a 2,900 mile Tour de France and the 2,745 mile Tour Divide. They have though.
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Rob Ainsley
Rob Ainsley
Rob Ainsley is a cycling writer, but does more cycling than writing. He’s collecting international End to Ends, has ridden all Britain’s rhyming coast to coasts, and once biked to all the places in the world called ‘Bath’. He lives in York but is usually somewhere else.
URL http://e2e.bike/
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Sarah Outen
Sarah Outen
In November 2015 Sarah Outen completed her London2London:Via the World expedition: a mammoth attempt to row, cycle and kayak 25, 000 miles around the Northern Hemisphere. The journey took 4.5 years and was all the richer for not turning out exactly as planned. 'Home', the feature film of that journey is out now on VimeoOnDemand.
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Sophie Gordon
Sophie Gordon
Sophie Gordon works on off-road access at charity Cycling UK, from traffic-free railway trails to epic long-distance adventures and everything in between.
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Stephen Fabes
Stephen Fabes
Stephen Fabes is a medical doctor and writer who spent six years cycling around the world, crossing six continents, 75 countries, and riding 86,209 km a distance equivalent to more than twice around the earth. En route he visited remote medical projects set up to help different marginalised communities.
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Stephen Lord
Stephen Lord
Stephen Lord wrote the first two editions of Adventure Cycle-touring Handbook. In 2016 he qualified as a CHEK Practitioner, teaching holistic health, lifestyle and exercise.
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Suzie O'Shea
Suzie O'Shea
Suzie Cycles
Suzie (she/her) cycled over 7,500 km’s across Canada in 2018. She is a bike mechanic, public speaker and founder of Suzie Cycles, a social enterprise dedicated to making biking better for womxn and nonbinary folx through accessible and inclusive bike education. Suzie is from Ireland and lives in Vancouver, Canada.
Suzie Cycles
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Tim Millikin
Tim Millikin
Tim cycled 46,500km around the world between May 2015-2018. He says that simply riding his bike makes him happy whether this is short or long trips. Since completing his around the world trip, Tim can be now be found guiding bike tours or working as a bushcraft instructor in between his own smaller cycling trips. His book 'Reading to Reading, a bicycle journey around the world' is out in the middle of February.
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Tim Moss
Tim Moss
The Next Challenge
Tim has supported over 100 expeditions across all seven continents, including cycling 13,000 miles around the world with his wife (festival organiser Laura Moss) and setting a Guinness World Record for the longest distance cycled on a rickshaw. His annual expedition bursary, 'The Next Challenge Grant', has helped fund over 50 first-time adventurers.
The Next Challenge
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Timmy Mallett
Timmy Mallett
Timmy began his broadcasting career in student radio and local radio but really rocketed to fame with the ‘Wide Awake Club’ and ‘Wacaday’ shows on TV-AM - featuring the famous ‘Mallett’s Mallet’. And who can forget Timmy’s moment as one of the UK’s most unlikely pop stars when his cover version of ‘Itsy Bitsy Teeny Weeny Yellow Polka Dot Bikini’ with Bombalurina topped the charts and stormed Europe in 1990? Timmy is an increasingly renowned artist, and a number of the pictures which he painted on his way to Spain are included in his Utterly Brilliant memoir.
Time
February 12 (Friday) - 21 (Sunday)(GMT+00:00) View in my time
