Ussumane Silla from Guinea Bissau is one of those who has benefitted. “I was arrested, I was imprisoned, tortured,” he says matter-of-factly in an interview for one of The Bike Project’s promotional videos. “After that, I managed to escape and then I came to the UK.”

Unfortunately it’s not been an easy ride for Ussumane since he arrived. “At the moment I’m homeless,” he explains. “I’ve been living in shelters.” But having a bike has made him more independent, able to move from shelter to shelter and to get out and about during the day. “I use my bike every single day,” he says.

According to Jem, the practical advantages of having a bike are just the start. The sense of ownership and the feeling of freedom are also hugely beneficial, especially for those who’ve lost everything or been imprisoned. “A lot of people just go for a cycle, they don’t even go anywhere in particular, they just use it to explore, exercise, that kind of thing. The benefits from that are really significant,” he says.

The idea that you can help someone who’s lived through the horrors of prison and torture, or the Syrian Civil War, simply by giving them a bike might sound like a wishy-washy liberal fantasy. But The Bike Project are scrupulous about making sure that what they do is helping in a quantifiable way, carrying out rigorous impact assessments.

Obviously, he says “there are lots of other factors that come into that. How someone’s feeling on a bike is only a small part of it, but the anecdotal evidence and the qualitative evidence of people feeling better [because of cycling] is all there.”

While it’s nice for Jem and his team to have hard evidence that they’re making a difference, it’s also increasingly a necessity. “As you get bigger, you get more funding and the pots of money that you can apply for get bigger,” he says. To win bigger grants you need to provide proof that what you’re doing actually works. So the team have adopted an increasingly professionalised approach. “We now have a development manager who handles all the fundraising bits.”

It’s paying off too. The Bike Project recently won a grant from the UK government to support their pioneering program which teaches refugee women to cycle. “We found that actually most refugee women never learned to cycle in their countries of origin. They came from societies where it just wasn’t socially acceptable to cycle.

“They had never learned or if they’d learned it had been in a park – they weren’t allowed out on roads and weren’t that confident. So we [now] teach refugee women to cycle from scratch basically, so that they can benefit in the same way that men can.”

Jem tells me they also have plans to expand outside of London in the near future. “We’re currently applying for funding from the lottery to set up a branch in Birmingham.” It’s certainly come a long way from the days when it was Jem fixing up a few bikes in his back garden.

“The sense of ownership and the feeling of freedom are hugely beneficial, especially for those who’ve lost everything or been imprisoned.”

A big part of The Bike Project’s success and continued growth, Jem says, has been down to people’s generosity and willingness to give their time and expertise for free. When it comes to impact assessments and fundraising, he says: “People have actually been really great at giving us advice, and teaching me stuff and teaching all the staff stuff”.

At one stage The Bike Project was even the subject of a petition by the neo-Nazi group Britain First. “We got a load of bikes from the police and they were like: ‘The bikes should be going to British people’. But it wasn’t an independent petition, it was just on their website and they got like 200 signatures or something. And [even] that was probably just a made-up figure.

“They’re pretty nasty people but also kind of pathetically useless as well.”

Given the tone of the national discourse around refugees, with right wing papers like the Sun and the Daily Mail spewing out a steady stream of negative articles, I’m slightly surprised that there hasn’t been more of that sort of thing. But in fact, Jem says the opposite is true.

“The thing that we get more is the backlash against that,” he says. “We benefitted a lot from a kind of liberal backlash over the refugee crisis, over Trump, over Brexit. When Trump tweeted something about refugees, we got loads of donations of money through the website.”

“When Trump tweeted something about refugees, we got loads of donations of money through the website”

The delicious irony of the anti-refugee President’s rants actually helping refugees isn’t lost on Jem. He laughs. “Yeah, although the national discourse is depressing, I’ve seen a lot of people reacting against that and they react against that by supporting us.

“There’s been a real movement of people that are fighting against that and we’ve kind of surfed that wave in a way.” And as long as that movement continues, it will keep The Bike Project rolling, and help it to help out those who need it most.