10.00am - 12.30pm Sunday 25th July Repair Cafe - Croft Field Centre

Hungerford Repair Café opens its doors for the first time

Residents from Hungerford and surrounding villages paid their first visit to Hungerford Repair Café on Sunday 25th July in the Croft Field Activity Centre.

Hungerford Repair Café is part of a growing international network of places where visitors bring their broken items to start making repairs with the help of local volunteers. If you have nothing to repair, you can enjoy a cup of tea or coffee, or you can lend a hand with someone else’s repair job.

On Sunday, 7 volunteers helped more than 50 visitors to fix items including garden tools that needed sharpening, a broken garden parasol and some rather tricky electrical appliances that had stopped working. The café provided welcome refreshments for all, including the hard working volunteers. The volunteers helped to mend 60% of the items brought to their tables, and were able to suggest things the owners could do to fix a further 25% of them.

Our aim with the Hungerford Repair Café is to help our community learn how to repair their own things in an enjoyable and sociable setting. A direct benefit of this is that we can reduce the waste we throw away and become a more sustainable community. Our first event has saved about 80 Kg of material going into landfill or other recycling centres.

Hungerford Repair Café is supported by the Rotary Club of Hungerford, Hungerford Environment Action Team, and the West Berks Repair Café based in Thatcham. Donations have covered the cost of running the event, and any surplus will be put towards our supporters own charity work, and to improve future Hungerford Repair Café events.

Date for your diaries - the next Hungerford Repair Café will be on Sunday 19th September at the new venue of the Corn Exchange, in the Town Hall. Doors open at 10.00, until 12.30. We hope to see you there.

Please check local websites, social media and Penny Post for further announcements. Just look for Hungerford Repair Café.