Last weekend I visited the Repair Café who were celebrating their seventh year. Organised by Transition Worcester they meet at 11am on the second Saturday of the month at Unity House on Stanley Road. The Repair Café is supported by the Duckworth Trust.

Repair Cafes are volunteer-run initiatives where people bring their broken items for repair instead of discarding them. These cafes operate in shared community spaces and offer regular events where skilled volunteers assist individuals in fixing a variety of items, encouraging a DIY approach and fostering skill-sharing.

Repair Cafes are a little bit like what you may have seen on the TV show ‘The Repair Shop’. The main difference being that with Worcester’s Repair Café anyone can rock up with just about anything that is broken with no need for the object having a back story or it being a family heirloom.

Do you remember the days when you could buy a new heating element for a kettle, or we actually made repairs to clothes rather than throwing them away in what we now call fast fashion?

Our Repair Café takes on everything from sharpening secateurs to a stopped clock, to a laptop not turning on, to a broken zip, to a vacuum cleaner needing a new drive belt. Repair Cafes help reduce waste by extending the lifespan of items that would otherwise end up in landfills. They promote repair, reuse, and repurposing, challenging the throwaway culture.

Repair Cafes are friendly places. They serve tea and cake and are a safe space for community members to connect, share skills, and engage in meaningful interactions. Participants not only get their items repaired but also forge relationships, strengthening the social fabric of their community.

So, take a bow everyone leading Transition Worcester. Transition Worcester recognises that on a finite planet with eight billion largely very poor people we can’t expect to continue to use and abuse the resources we have in countries like ours. As well as Repair Café Transition Worcester also promotes energy conservation, has created a community teaching garden and rescues at least some of the tonnes of perfectly good food routinely thrown away by the big supermarkets every day. Thank you.

For more information: www.transitionworcester.org.uk