Volunteers fixed more than two thousand items this year, from toasters to bicycles.
On the second Saturday of every month, the church hall on Tanner’s Row in Calder’s old town fills with the smell of solder and the hum of a dozen conversations about broken things. A woman holds up a hairdryer that cuts out after a minute. A teenager wheels in a bicycle with a buckled rear wheel. An elderly man unwraps a radio from a tea towel and explains that it belonged to his father. By four o’clock, most of them will leave with their possessions working again.
The Tanner’s Row Repair Cafe has been running for six years, but this has been its busiest by far. Its forty volunteers fixed 2,140 items between January and the end of October, according to the log they keep at the door, against around 1,300 in the whole of last year. Demand has grown so quickly that the cafe introduced a booking system in the spring, and the waiting list for electrical repairs now runs to about seven weeks.
From toasters to tents
Small kitchen appliances make up the largest share of the work – toasters, kettles, food mixers and coffee machines account for about a third of all repairs. Clothing and textiles come next, followed by bicycles, lamps, laptops and phones. The more unusual entries in this year’s log include a child’s rocking horse with a split leg, a camping tent with a torn seam, a 1960s sewing machine and a set of bagpipes.
The cafe charges nothing, though visitors are invited to put a donation in a jar by the tea urn. Spare parts are paid for by the customer at cost. Volunteers estimate that the average repair takes about forty minutes and that roughly four in five items are fixed on the day.
“People arrive apologetic, as if they are wasting our time with a three-pound toaster. Then they watch us open it up, find a loose wire, and put it back together, and they leave feeling like they have learned a secret. Half of them come back as volunteers,” said Wendell Afolabi, a retired electrician who coordinates the cafe’s electrical bench.
Mr Afolabi, who began volunteering after his wife brought a lamp in for repair four years ago, said most faults were simpler than people expected: worn fuses, broken switches, snapped belts, blocked filters. What stops people mending things themselves, he said, is less a lack of skill than a lack of confidence – and, increasingly, products designed to be hard to open.
Why demand is rising
The organisers put this year’s surge down to a mix of household budgets and changing attitudes. With prices for new appliances still high, a free repair is an obvious attraction. But the cafe’s coordinator, Philippa Grange, said a growing number of visitors talked about not wanting to throw things away.
“We get people who could easily afford a new kettle. They just don’t want another one going to landfill,” she said. The cafe estimates that its repairs this year kept around four tonnes of goods out of the waste stream, based on standard weights for each type of item.
The rise has also been fuelled by word of mouth. A short video of volunteers restoring a child’s broken music box was shared widely in the spring, and the following month’s session drew so many visitors that the queue stretched around the corner onto the canal path. That was the day the organisers decided they needed a booking system.
Growing pains
The waiting list has brought its own problems. The church hall is only available one day a month, and volunteers are reluctant to work longer hours. The cafe has approached the city’s libraries about running additional sessions, and a trial evening session at the Harrow branch library is planned for January.
Local retailers have taken notice. Two hardware shops in the old town now stock a small range of common spare parts – fuses, kettle switches, vacuum belts – and refer customers to the cafe. One electrical retailer on the high street has offered to donate test equipment, and a bicycle shop near the station has agreed to supply inner tubes and brake blocks at cost.
The organisers are also looking for more volunteers, particularly people with experience of sewing machines, phones and laptops, where the waiting times are longest. No formal qualifications are needed for most roles, Ms Grange said, though electrical repairs are always checked by a qualified volunteer before items are handed back.
The next session is on Saturday from ten until four. Bookings for electrical items are full until the new year, but textiles and bicycles can still be brought along on the day.
