Crowborough Repair Café
First Saturday of the month
Ashdown School on Herne Road
Starts 10am
What is a Repair Café
The idea behind Repair Cafés is to reduce the amount of stuff that is thrown away. With some simple fixes, items including electrical goods, garden tools and clothing could be given a new lease of life. This reduces the volume of raw materials and energy needed to make new products.
- Repair household items and save them from landfill
- A chance to learn or teach useful skills
- Bring together people in the community to work together
The initiative is part of Green Transition Crowborough – a community group that promotes local action in the Crowborough area which encourages sustainability. Take a look at our other initiatives.
There are now over 2,200 Repair Cafés around the world. There are others nearby in Forest Row, Tunbridge Wells and Uckfield. So if you are not from Crowborough you can visit one in your area. For additional information about the initiative, see this website: www.repaircafe.org.
Voluntary Donations
Anyone will be able to bring along items that need repairing for free, but if you are able to make a small donation towards our running costs (such as materials and room hire) – that would be appreciated. However donations are totally voluntary.
Why do we need a Repair Café?
Our modern world uses too much stuff and we are consuming resources at an unsustainable rate. Repair Cafés extend the life of many different types of items including electronics, small wooden items, toys, clothes & textiles and bikes.
Repair Cafés provide a way for people to pass on their skills to others, so that we can all learn to maintain and value what we’ve got. In this way, we can gradually change our mentality to conserve, not throw away.
Do you have an item that needs repairing?
Why not bring your broken items to the Crowborough Repair Café in order to give them a new lease of life? We have a wide range of repairers who love fixing things and are keen to pass on their knowledge.
As the name would suggest, we also have a café providing tea, coffee and homemade cakes – so you can treat yourself while you wait to be seen.
We operate on a one item basis, but will happily do more repairs if there’s time, although in order to be fair to others you may have to wait again. Dogs are not allowed on the premises (inside or out). Please ensure items are reasonable clean for our repairers to work on. See the house rules for more information about how Repair Cafés operate and the limitations.
If you can carry the item in, we’ll happily try to fix it for you.
Many people will have seen The Repair Shop. The difference is we can’t spend days restoring items as on the TV show. The aim is to make an item work again or prolong its life. It is more like intensive care than cosmetic surgery.
The Crowborough Repair Café is normally held on the first Saturday of the month. It is held at Ashdown School (junior site) on Herne Road. It opens at 10am. The last repair starts at about 12.15pm.
There is parking on the school site (TN6 2NT Google map).
We look forward to seeing you and helping to repair your broken item.
Additional Volunteers
We need additional volunteers to build the team in order to keep the Repair Café going long-term and expand the range of items we can fix. If you have skills repairing electrical items, an ability to sharpen knives & scissors, you can mend ceramics or jewellery (or you can repair other items for that matter) please get in touch.
As there is a café, we need people to bake cakes in the days before and people to serve refreshments on the day.
There is also a need for general helpers to welcome people on arrival, log and allocate jobs.
Contact Us
Click to Like and Follow Crowborough Repair Café on Facebook.
Get in touch using the following email address, if you might like to volunteer or want to ask about repairs: repaircafe@greentransitioncrowborough.org.uk.