How to Start a Repair Café

Repair cafés are community-run spaces where people bring broken items — from torn clothing and faulty lamps to bicycles and electronics — run by volunteers. Across the UK, they're already changing the way communities think about waste, skills, and connection.

You don't need a large budget or a perfect plan to begin. Many successful repair cafés started with a handful of volunteers, a borrowed hall, and a handwritten poster. The real value is in the community it builds — people learning from each other, reducing waste, and finding connection over a cup of tea and a soldering iron.

Find a Repair Café Near You

Before starting your own, it's worth checking whether there's already something happening in your area. The Community Repair Network maintains an interactive map of repair groups across the whole of the UK, searchable by location at communityrepairnetwork.org.uk/find.

Setting up your own Repair cafe

1.Find a space

Start with what's already in your community. Church halls, libraries, community centres, and village halls are all well-suited — they tend to have tables, power sockets, and either low or no hire fees for community groups. Contact your local council to ask about grant funding or subsidised space; many councils actively support repair and sustainability initiatives.

Aim for somewhere with good lightn ( so you can see what you're repairing well), enough room to spread out, and ideally a small kitchen for tea and coffee. A central, accessible location will make a real difference to how many people use the service.

2.Find the others

You don't need experts in every discipline from day one - start with whoever you can find and build from there. Good places to look include local Facebook groups and Nextdoor, community noticeboards and parish newsletters, libraries a education centres.

Be clear about what you're asking for: typically a few hours once a month and practical skills in areas such as sewing, electronics, woodwork, or bike maintenance. Many people are willing to help once they realise the commitment is not huge and as always, for many the appeal is in getting to spend time with others while giving something back.

Its also worth chatting to others who are already ruinning a repair hub so you can learn from their experiences - the Restarters community is a great place to start.

3.Advertising

Try social media posts in local community groups
Flyers in libraries and on notice boards,
a listing on the Repair Café International map at repaircafe.org,
and a press release to your local paper — journalists are often keen on community sustainability stories.

Local schools, scouts groups, and environmental organisations may also want to partner or send volunteers.

4.Look into insurance

The Community Repair network have lots of information on what you need to cover with reagard to Health and saftey and insurance when setting up a repair cafe. The Restarters community also has an excellent guide worth a read

Repair Cafés already running around the UK:

These are just a few examples of Repair hubs/cafes in the UK that show what's possible.

The Hungerford Repair Café, run by local environmental charity HEAT Hungerford, is a free community event where volunteers help repair damaged or faulty household items — clothes, furniture, electrical goods, garden tools, toys, and even items of sentimental value. Volunteers bring their tools and materials so that nothing has to be thrown away before it's been given a second chance.

Repair Café Wales was founded in 2017 by Joe O'Mahoney, and Cerys Jones, frustrated with the unsustainable growth of landfill and waste. Their first café opened in the Cathays area of Cardiff and proved so popular that people were travelling from miles away to attend. The network has since grown to more than 130 repair cafes nationwide, with Welsh Government investment through the Circular Economy Fund helping to establish them.

In London, The Restart Project was founded by Janet Gunter and Ugo Vallauri in 2013 to help people learn how to repair their broken electronics and rethink how they consume them in the first place. As well as running community repair events, the Restart Project campaigns for the right to repair and collects data from repair events to advocate for more sustainable product design.

In Scotland, Repair Café Glasgow was founded by Jonathan Dawes on the principles of Repair Café International, with the aim of building social cohesion alongside reducing landfill waste.

In Edinburgh, the Edinburgh Remakery — an award-winning environmental social enterprise — runs popular repair cafés in partnership with the Edinburgh Tool Library, working to reduce waste across the capital.