Cardiff is one of the UK’s worst cities for cycle theft, but where do they all go?
CARDIFF has a bike theft problem. There were 1,074 bike thefts reported to South Wales Police in 2024 alone, with 421 of these in the city centre.
This makes it the third worst city in England and Wales. South Glamorgan is the single worst region.
Where I live, in Butetown, South Wales Police issued a warning in January that bike theft was higher than usual. The morning after, I walked out of my house to see a bike with the wheels taken off.
I had the idea to track a stolen bike after my friends had their bikes stolen five times from Central Square over two months.
One of these was Eva Cahill.
The 24-year-old had locked her bike outside her university building in Central Square at 11am. She’d had the bike since she was 15, but this was her first time using it in Cardiff. By 4pm, it was missing.
“It vanished. I thought I’d forgotten where I’d left it,” she said.
“It wasn’t an expensive bike but it had a lot of sentimental value. It’s really annoying to think it’s still out there but someone else is using it.”
The police were helpful in logging the crime, but they couldn’t do anything, especially as she didn’t know her bike’s serial number.
She now uses her mum’s old bike, double locks it and leaves it under CCTV cameras.
But Eva and I wondered what happened to her bike once it was stolen. To find out, I bought a GPS tracker and put it on a second-hand bike.
At 4pm, I cable-locked the bike with the tracker fitted underneath the saddle near where Eva had hers taken.
At 3pm the next day, I got a notification that my bike had moved.
This map showed it travelling around the city centre.
Coincidentally, about an hour before I got the notification I saw two other bikes being carried away from broken locks and abandoned wheels. I followed the people who took them.
They, too, went all around the city centre, in almost exactly the same path. They gave the wheels to someone and received something small in return. I then saw them go into a car park and put something up their noses.
Dave Hanns, the owner of Motorlegs Cycle Workshop, said it’s “standard” for bikes to be traded for drugs.
“Most bike thieves are driven by a need to get a fix,” Dave said.
“Most stolen bikes end up injected in someone’s arm.”
Born in Cardiff, Dave doesn’t look down on the people whose hard lives have led them into bike theft.
“I’ve been offered stolen bikes before but you can usually tell. A guy will come to sell his bike and it’s a woman’s bike about half his size, or else they have two tell-tale dents in the frame where the D-lock has been levered off,” the 56-year-old said.
He’s seen it first hand many times.
“One time I was serving a woman and her two children, buying a bike for her son. She turned around to pay for literally two seconds and the bike was gone. Only the children saw it happen.”
He gave her son a spare bike.
“In central Cardiff, I’ve even seen gangs of people with angle grinders, or people with bolt cutters wearing high-vis to pose as council staff.”
My bike didn’t stay in the city centre for long. Within an hour of it being taken, it travelled across Sanatorium Park and to an address in Fairwater.
It didn’t move for a couple of days so I went there to check it out.
I could hear drill music coming from the house, and though I never saw a face, a tattooed hand holding a long cigarette was visible in the doorway. A dog was barking inside.
I sent a letter with a contact number explaining the tracker and that I wanted an anonymous conversation.
In the meantime, I went to another bike shop nearby in Fairwater.
The owner of Outdoor Cycles, Michael Winter, had stolen bikes sold to him a couple of times, and only realised when the police came round to find them.
It’s common for stolen bikes to be sold on online marketplaces or to second-hand bike shops. The bikes will be traded by the people who steal them to professionals who move them and sell them on.
Michael now sends the police the serial number of every bike he gets. They think he’s just getting them to do his admin, but he says he’s protecting himself in case he inadvertently buys a stolen bike.
“The police come here instead of going out there to find them. It’s much easier for them because they’re so hard to find,” the 71-year-old said.
The vast majority of reported cases result in the investigation being closed with no suspect identified.
With police unable to do much about bike theft, there are ways the owner can minimise the chances of their bike being stolen.
Dave Hanns doesn’t recommend expensive locks or leaving it near CCTV cameras – instead he says not to leave it outside at all.
“Know where you’re going and where you can leave your bike inside.”
He says there’s cafes in Cardiff that will take a bike, and if a cyclist is coming in for the day they’re even welcome to leave it in the backyard of his workshop.
“It’s all about customer service.”
I haven’t yet had a reply to the letter. The tracker is offline despite being fully charged, so it’s likely that someone has found and disabled it. What happens to Cardiff’s stolen bikes remains a mystery.
