Bristol Repair Café’s: What do you do with a chair when the leg has come loose? With a toaster that no longer works? Or a woollen jumper with moth holes? Toss it? No way!
You can repair it at the Repair Café! They have volunteers with expertise and skills to share offer free help with repairing faulty or broken appliances, toys or bikes, clothing or textile repairs, or help with getting to know how tools or appliances work such as a new phone or sewing machine. There are Repair cafés in various parts of the City and meet between 10:30 and 13:00 on the first Saturday of every month.

Repair Café Blog:

The very first Repair Café in Britain was set up here in Fishponds, Bristol, in 2012, meeting in All Saints Church on the first Saturday of the month. Having come back together last year post-Covid, we remain the longest running café so far! The café’s founder, Kate Jerrold, worked in the reclamation business and was used to mending and restoring items, but realised that other people were less confident in having a go. As she said at the time in an interview, children used to be encouraged to take things apart and put them back together again, in ways we wouldn’t dare now! Since then, there are hundreds of repair cafes across the UK. Here in Bristol, most of the cafés regularly share information, ideas and experiences (and their times and dates) on the Bristol Repair Cafes Facebook page.

One question that is often asked – and one that worried us initially at the Fishponds Café - is, do the cafés take business away from professional repair specialists? Repair café say not: menders are advisors as much as anything, and will recommend visiting the professionals if they are unsure or unable to easily fix things. But the main aims are these: to keep things that still have a life in them, out of landfill, and to encourage people to fix what can be fixed at home. Here at the Fishponds Café we have recently worked with Bristol Waste, and sometimes offer a free shop of reconditioned and tested electrical items, which have simply been chucked due to a small fault. Sometimes this is as simple – and as astonishing – as a lamp needing a new bulb!

Cafés are free: whilst most offer teas and coffees for a small price or donation, you are not obliged to pay anything. Volunteers at Bristol cafés come from the local community, and include people from all walks of life: here at Fishponds we range in age from 20s to retired, but all offering differing skills from electricals to engineering, to sewing to gardening equipment. They’ve even advised on fixing a car, and recently one of our sewing people mended this beautiful old bear (pictured right). And who can forget the ‘man vs chipper’ session when they refused to give up on a cranky wood-chipping machine.

Of course, all this started well before the Repair Shop TV series, and fans of that might need to appreciate that a volunteer in a repair café can’t always do such a skilled job on precious items, and sometimes there is a bit of a wait to be seen. But it’s great fun, it’s interesting watching the menders, it’s helping people save money, and it’s environmentally sound. And there’s usually loads of biscuits. Our future plans involve more workshops and ‘how to’ sessions so you too can enjoy the pleasures of mending, whether that’s darning your favourite jumper or finally fixing your toaster!

Repair Café Blog:

Written by: Kate Brooks