The café door swings open on a crisp morning. A chair wobbles. A toy has lost an eye. An electric kettle whistles weakly. Yet when people gather here—at the Tunbridge Wells Repair Café in the UK, or in similar spaces around the world—broken things don’t signal waste. They are invitations: to fix, to learn, to connect.
When Chris Murphy first heard about Repair Cafés in 2019, he felt something stir inside him. “It’s abhorrent seeing things thrown away,” he said, bitterly recalling visits to the tip where perfectly usable items were discarded.
At 51, with a stubborn belief that people and objects both deserve better, Chris founded the Tunbridge Wells Repair Café. What began as a small gathering of volunteers has grown, now boasting 28 repair stations and 75 volunteers, one of the largest in southeast England.
But the story of a Repair Café is not just about tools, fixers, and frayed wiring. It’s about something much more human.
Hands That Fix, Hearts That Connect
In Amsterdam, for example, residents who bring broken kettles, toasters, lamps and sewing machines to Repair Cafés leave with more than their fix—they leave with knowledge and community. At the Amsterdam café in De Meervaart, volunteer repairers say about 80% of items brought in are repairable.
Meanwhile, in Colorado, a church-based event brought together people across generations. A 100-year-old teddy bear was lovingly mended. Garden shears were sharpened. A seamstress restored the paws on a beloved toy.
It’s these real-life moments that show how repair cafés are more than just about saving stuff. They stitch together social bonds that are fraying in many places: neighbors meet, skills are shared, stories emerge.
Someone waiting in line discovers they have something in common with the person fixing their item. Someone overhears a repair trick passed down from their grandparents. And sometimes, hearing about someone else’s broken pot or toaster reminds you of your own, and prompts you to act.
Transforming Objects: From Throw-Away To Treasure
Repair cafés respond to the underlying culture of disposability with a quiet, practical defiance. Designed obsolescence, throw-away design, insufficient spare parts—these are often the hurdles. Yet when people are taught, tools are made available, and items are mended instead of replaced, something shifts.
The Repair Café movement started in Amsterdam in 2009, when Martine Postma felt compelled to do something about waste—not by writing about it, but by changing how communities treat broken things. Over the years the movement has grown to thousands of cafés in dozens of countries, each independent but connected via Repair Café Foundation and informal networks.
At Tunbridge Wells, for instance, Chris and his volunteers use an online system (rather than paper-forms) to assign repair stations, schedule visitors, log outcomes. Small innovations, but they have enormous ripple effects: efficiency, better tracking of what gets fixed vs what doesn’t, lower barriers for visitors.
Mindset, Community, Hope
This is the point that captures the true power of the movement. When people come to repair cafés, they are not just bringing broken things; they are bringing stories, memories, hopes. They are also bringing constraints—financial, emotional, environmental. And repair cafés often respond on all these levels.
- Learning And Empowerment
- Visitors don’t just hand over their items—they stay, watch, learn. Someone teaches; someone else observes. For many, this is a chance to reclaim skills that modern consumer culture has made invisible. In Colorado, volunteers described teaching people to repair clothing, sharpen tools, sew patches—skills that once were widespread, now rare.
- Shifting Values
- The idea that something broken is automatically useless becomes less acceptable. Repair cafés promote a mindset where reuse, mending, caring for what we own becomes a virtue—not just an economic benefit but an ecological and moral one. People begin to see value in what others might discard. Amsterdam’s cafés, for instance, motivate people to try repairing before throwing away.
- Reducing Waste And Environmental Impact
- Every item fixed is an item diverted from landfill. Electricals, clothing, furniture once thought done for can be restored. In UK cafés alone, recent data show tens of thousands of electrical items saved in just one year.
- Strengthening Community Ties
- Repair cafés draw people from across ages, backgrounds, skills. They provide a space where people are equal: someone who knows little can sit beside someone who knows much; someone who has lost more sees how generous strangers can be. In Tunbridge Wells, about 70 people visit each event; volunteers don’t just fix—they converse, laugh, share.
- Hope In Action
- Often, these cafés become tangible reminders that individuals and communities can make change, however small. They push back against feelings of helplessness in the face of consumer culture, climate crisis, waste. They show that a screwdriver, a seamstitch, a smile can matter.
Balancing Act: Challenges And Promise
No movement is without hurdles. Spare parts may be hard to source. Volunteers are generous, but volunteer burnout is real. Many repair cafés run only weekly or monthly; their reach remains localized. Designing products to be repairable is still not the norm, and legislation (for example “right to repair”) is inconsistent.
Yet the promise is real. The growing number of repair cafés globally, the increasing public enthusiasm (evidenced by data ahead of International Repair Day: 1,158 active groups recorded by Open Repair Alliance, hundreds of thousands of items saved) speaks to a movement that resonates.
Conclusion
On a cold morning at Tunbridge Wells, a volunteer tightens a kettle’s heating element. Across the city, someone mends a favorite toy or patches a quilt. An elderly visitor marvels at how simple it is to fix what he thought was beyond saving. A child watches with wonder.
Repair cafés don’t promise perfection. They don’t solve every item’s defect. But they offer something richer: community. They offer dignity to both things and people. They remind us that sometimes hope isn’t about grand gestures—it’s about gathering in a room, holding a soldering iron, sharing a stitch, and saying quietly to ourselves: Yes, I can help make this world a little less broken.
