The community repair cafes fixing sentimental and everyday items

“The whole thing came about because people started to get fed up with throwaway culture. In this day and age, we shouldn’t be throwing it all away, we should be repairing it and keeping it going.”

Clare Beckhelling volunteers for Repair Cafe Redditch, where repairers try and mend people’s objects, from the everyday to the heartbreakingly sentimental.

While the core motivation of these groups is to mend and repair, many people say they have found a new purpose and a community as a result of attending a repair cafe.

The BBC spoke to repair cafes in Worcestershire, Staffordshire and Shropshire to find out more about how they are benefiting their communities.

Pam Beale runs the Lichfield Repair and Share Cafe, with a repair cafe in Lichfield’s Curborough Community Centre and another in St Joseph’s Catholic Church in Burntwood.

The two repair cafes get around 60 people a month combined, bringing in their belongings to be mended by the volunteers.

“Our oldest repairer is 96,” Ms Beale said. “He was an expert in furniture and marquetry and he knows about how a lot of things are put together.”

Some of the items brought in are everyday objects, from tools to clothes, while others have a more significant history and sentimental importance to the owner.

“We had two or three record turntables in particular. One belonged to a woman whose husband had passed away and she really wanted to play their records again,” Ms Beale said.

“She was in floods of tears [when it was fixed]. Another woman wanted hers mended because her husband had dementia and she wanted the records to bring back memories for him.”

Repair Cafe Redditch has been running for around eight years with 31 volunteers, taking place once a month at Webheath Village Hall, with its success leading to the setting up of another repair cafe in Studley.

Volunteers have recently mended a porcelain doll from 1947, gifted to the owner when she was five years old, and a 70-year-old teddy bear.

“People are very attached to [dolls and bears] because it’s one of the things their parents gave to them when they were young,” Clare Beckhelling said.

One incredibly unique item was repaired by the Studley Repair Cafe in November, brought to the cafe by a man whose mother had travelled to the UK as part of the Windrush generation.

The item was a set of fairy lights wrapped in delicate skeleton leaves from the West Indies, which were brought over on the Windrush by his mother.

The lights had failed and the leaves had become fragile, but one of the team gently removed each leaf and ironed them flat, before delicately wrapping the leaves around a fresh set of fairy lights and placing back onto the tree that they had been brought in on.

“When he saw it glowing again, his face said everything,” the team said.

“A moment of pure joy – shared by all of us.”

Shrewsbury Repair Cafe, which started in 2017 and has more than 45 volunteers helping out each month, is using the Christmas period to send a message of repairing and reusing instead of buying new.

Pete Martin, a repairer and administrator for the group, said: “We have all been faced with the situation of bringing down the storage box from the roof or out of the garage, getting the familiar decorations out and finding that the lights don’t flicker or that musical ornament doesn’t play.

“Instead of rushing out to replace them, at the repair cafe we may be able to repair them, either by checking the wiring or simply by cleaning the contacts as the batteries were left in all year.

“It could be that your favourite festive jumper has a hole in it – we can patch or darn it so it can be worn again.”

Sustainability is at the core of the repair cafes across the region, with Ms Beckhelling and Ms Beale both having volunteered for eco-groups before they joined the cafes.

“It did come out of a need, a desire to improve, to be more environmental and ecological and less wasteful,” Ms Beckhelling said.

“Some things just need a fuse, for the sake of 50p. A Sony Walkman was put back to use for the sake of a very specific elasticated band that cost £6.87.”

Ms Beale added: “It’s about taking responsibility for all aspects of your life rather than just an impulse thing. Many of which are made out of something that might never biodegrade, that will last forever.

“Think of the supply chain and the creation of items – the mining of minerals for a phone or tech or disposable vapes.

“Everything is valuable and somewhere far away someone with not much money is at the bottom of all of this.”

And while being environmentally responsible is the ethos of these groups, they have also had an impact on their local communities of bringing people together.

All three groups who spoke to the BBC said many people who felt socially isolated came to the cafes just for a tea and a slice of cake sometimes, to have a chat to the other people in attendance. For others, volunteering has given them a sense of purpose.

Ms Beckhelling said: “An ex-engineer said ‘you’ve saved my weekend, I was tearing my hair out after I retired and twiddling my thumbs and he was going bonkers at home.’ He loves it.”