What is a repair cafe?
Chiswick Repair Café is a voluntary initiative to reduce waste, share repair skills and enhance our community. We try to prevent useful items being thrown away.
How does it work? You bring a broken or worn item to us and we do our best to help you mend it, or advise what else can be done. You pay for parts and we hope that you will make a donation towards our operating costs.
What you can bring
Almost anything that one person can carry!
Here are some of the things that repair cafes have fixed:
- Food mixer
- Toaster
- Bicycle
- Tools
- Garden equipment
- Clothing, bags and other textiles
- Toys
- Radio
What not to bring
We can’t tackle washing machines, fridges or other large white goods. This includes microwave ovens because the radiation can be dangerous if accidentally switched on during repair.
There’s not much we can do with mobile phones, smaller tablets or other miniaturised and highly compact equipment, apart from checking batteries and removable parts (like a memory card). We can’t replace broken screens, etc.
Safety equipment, such as smoke alarms, because we cannot certify it as fit for purpose after repair.
Find us
We're located at Christ Church, Turnham Green, W4 5DT
About us
A local group of keen environmentalists, involved with various green initiatives around Chiswick (community gardening, litter picking, recycling and looking for ways to improve air quality) are now rising to the challenge of addressing how we can move away from being a throw-away society.
When we say throw ‘away’ we forget that there is no such place as ‘away’ - everything has to go somewhere - and most likely it’s heading for landfill! Previously we would have taken broken items to a local repair shop - but there are now very few of those around (other than the wonderful Fuselodge shop in Acton Lane), so the rise of the Repair Café movement, whereby people who have these repair skills, share their knowledge and enthusiasm to prevent items being thrown away unnecessarily.
Who we are
TODO