This event has now happened (see below for details)
Join us just after the new year and bring your broken items so our experts can give them a second lease of life for free!
The wonderful volunteer repairers tackle electrical, gluing, sewing and woodwork repairs on an amazing variety of items – they will accept a challenge of almost anything!
We’re also collecting unwanted electric cables to support a copper recycling drive and reduce electronic waste. This helps sustainability encouraging and supporting metal recycling and keeping electronics and cabling out of landfill.
How it works
Our friendly volunteers will guide you through this process on the day. We don’t ask for payment, but if you can donate this all helps to keep the project running. The way it works is:
- doors open at 10am – come early to avoid queues
- bring a maximum of 2 things to repair
- fill out our form when you arrive to help the repairers know what’s wrong
- take a queue number, while you wait you can enjoy the Cafe and home-made cake, and chat to the Sustainable Amersham team about
- when your repair number comes up, take your item to the repairer and sit with them while they work on it so that they can ask questions and explain what they are doing
- return your completed repair form to us, whether your item has been fixed or not!
Send us an email if you would like to help us either as a repairer or a volunteer to support the Repair Cafe.
This is a regular event which runs every other month on the first Saturday in the month, from 10am and 1pm in St Michaels Church, Amersham on the Hill. If you can’t make our cafe there are lots of other local Repair Cafés in Buckinghamshire.
How the event went
Freezing January temperatures failed to put off customers for the New Year Amersham Repair Café, which attracted record numbers.
Another item brought in was an oil painting belonging to Elizabeth Beckwith, which had had a brush with disaster. The seascape, by M Bryant – a friend of Elizabeth’s late husband – had hung in her living room for decades. Alas her young great-granddaughter had knocked it off the wall with her feet, while practising gymnastics. The canvas escaped unscathed but the delicate gilded frame had broken at the corners. Glue and patience were required to put it back together.
33 items were successfully mended at the January Sustainable Amersham Repair Café, many of them household electrical goods and clothes needing a stitch.
As always, not everything could be fixed. Nick Marchant had motored in on a mobility scooter, from which the seat back had become detached. It belongs to his daughter Kate, who suffers from long Covid, and has had to lean forward for the past month while using the scooter, to avoid falling out of it. Volunteer repairer Judi is among the most skilled and versatile but after consulting with colleagues, she advised Nick on sourcing a metal bracket, to replace the broken attachments.
The Repair Café provides not just a chance to make do and mend. There’s real joy to be had in giving treasured items a new lease of life and preventing them going into landfill. It’s also a sociable event, with complimentary cuppa and cake while you wait. Any donations go towards the hire of the hall and to reimburse the repairers for their materials.
The next Amersham Repair Café will be held at St. Michael’s on Sycamore Road on Saturday 1 March from 10am to 1pm.