It’s a scene straight out of Graham Greene’s Brighton Rock: heat is shimmering off the hot pebbles on the beach; young and old showing off their knees as they paddle in the sparkling green sea. In the cool of Saint George’s church, Kemp Town, just uphill from the crowded Front, groups of people are sitting at bright blue and white gingham-clad tables, frowns of concentration wrinkling their foreheads.
At one table piled with ribbons, skeins of wool and material remnants, two women are crocheting, delicate leaf patterns falling from their hooked implements. At another a jolly group of four are mending toys and repairing rips in cardigans. At a third, a man is soldering the back of a circuit board while in the background a pianist tinkles out a mixture of jazz and flamenco melodies.
Victoria Jackson shows a customer how to mend her leather bag
Welcome to Brighton Repair Café, where instead of drinking lattes, “customers” learn how to fix old and broken household items so they can be saved and re-used rather than thrown away. Part of a growing movement begun in the Netherlands, Repair Cafes are run by volunteers who pass on their skills for free, to try to help people get more out of their possessions. Today, Brighton mum Anastasia Mainwaring is learning how to crochet so she can patch up an old and much loved jumper. “I haven’t been able to wear it for six months because in places it has worn gossamer-thin,” she says. “I’m learning how to create fern-shaped leaves which I can then sew onto the worn patches and wear my favourite jumper again.”
Another “customer” Dan Hadley, a third year student at Brighton and Sussex Medical School, is learning how to solder so he can mend his computer speakers. “I did Design and Technology at school but didn’t learn anything really practical,” says Dan. “I know what the problem is, the part where the jack connects to the electrical wire is broken. I want to learn to repair it rather than just chuck it out.”
The Brighton Repair Café was founded by Masters Graduate Victoria Jackson and is one of twelve similar groups now operating across the country, from Chesterfield in the north, to Brighton and Bristol in the south. The ethos is simple: volunteer repairers with skills ranging from darning, to bicycle mechanics to carpentry and electrical work give their time for a few hours once a month. Repairees drop in, learn a new skill and give a small donation in return. The money is spent on tools and materials such as darning mushrooms and thread, but mostly on the huge variety of screw driver heads required to mend electrical appliances.
Volunteer electrician Mattia Cobianchi, who for his day job is an acoustic engineer, says that more than three quarters of the time it takes to mend a piece of electrical equipment is spent on opening it up. “Mass production of appliances has brought down quality meaning they break more easily, but the sealed unit process which relies on using lots of glue and specialised screw heads actually makes them harder to repair. Some basic items like toasters, which we get in all the time, have up to six or seven different types of screw in their structure and you need a really specialised tool kit to open them up. Consumers are almost encouraged to throw things away rather than try and mend them.”
Miriam and Mattia with the repaired lamp
As well as shoddy and hard-to-repair appliances, we seem to have lost skills such as darning and minor electrical work that a few generations earlier were part and parcel of education. One young couple Miriam and Juan Carlos Garcia have brought in a new bedside lamp. The problem, identified by Mattia in a matter of minutes, is a blown fuse. “I was quite surprised it was so easy to mend,” says Miriam. “It’s such a simple thing but I was never taught how to check and replace a blown fuse.”
Another customer Irenka Motyka has made do and mended all her life, and has brought a ripped cardigan for the companionship rather than the need to learn a skill. “My parents fled Poland in the Second World War and for the first five years of my life I lived in a refugee camp in Oxfordshire,” she says. “We had nothing, so everything was patched and mended. It’s nice people want to learn these skills again.”
As for me, I learned “Swiss darning”, a way of strengthening knitwear before it gives way, to repair my jumpers. Also, thanks to design lecturer Sam Jarman who helps out with a range of practical repairs, I fixed my beloved but battered stove-top coffee machine whose rubber seal had disintegrated. It’s now good for another ten years.
For details of your nearest Repair café, and how to start one visit www.repaircafe.org
sarahjlonsdale 