Blackdown Hills Repair Café

Blackdown Hills Repair Café was launched in March 2018. Held on every other month in Hemyock the repair café has become a very popular and much-enjoyed event.

We repair electrical items, bicycles, clocks, watches, furniture, garden tools, computers, musical instruments, sewing machines, textiles and much more, and offer a knife and tool sharpening service. We have a repair success rate of over 70%!

Not only can members of the public get items repaired instead of throwing them away, but the repair café also provides the community with a place where they can meet and enjoy a chat together. While they wait for their repair to take place, they can enjoy a cup of tea and a slice of homemade cake, or even a bacon butty!

Due to Covid-19 the repair café itself has been paused but we our continuing our repairs by offering a remote repair service where people can drop off items for volunteers to repair and have already repaired more than 150 items in this way.

We owe our success to all our volunteers who help organise the repair café, carry out the repairs, help with administration and publicity and prepare the refreshments. We are very grateful for their support. We currently have 90 volunteers on our records, with 30 to 40 volunteers attending each event.

We have fixed hundreds of items so far, with more than 363 repairs carried out in a single day at our last repair café, held as part of Recycle Devon‘s Big Fix event 2020.

Our aspiration for the future is to create a repair hub linked to Hemyock’s proposed men’s shed, which would enable us to extend our repair activities, for example undertaking larger or more complex repairs.