This Saturday 26th July sees the Sidmouth Repair Café take its summer break – until it returns in September. Whether it’s a wonky lamp or set of blunt knives or pair of trusty old trousers, the dedicated team of fixers can help put things right. Between 10am and 1pm at St Francis Church Hall on Woolbrook Road.
.
There seem to be lots of good reasons to take stuff along to the Sidmouth Repair Café: of course, rather than having to throw whatever away, the Town’s repair café is helping us save money by helping us to fix these things and more.
But it is also a social space where we can sit and chat in an actual café, over cake and bacon butties.
Moreover, it is a green initiative making an impact – and every year, the Sidmouth Repair Cafe’s true value is shown in figures.
These are produced by Community Action Groups Devon (CAG), which the Repair Café belongs to and which gives the project a lot of support.
As it says on the CAG website:
Our first Repair Café was held in September 2018 and since then we have become an important part of our local community, winning the Sustainable Sidmouth Champions Award in 2023 and often getting involved in other projects like the Beach Toy Library on Sidmouth Esplanade.
As well as sharing and preserving repair skills for future generations, we put a high value on saving items from landfill, and also working to affirm the value of neighbourliness and a strong community.
Earlier this year, the district council announced dedicated support for local community action groups – and cited the Sidmouth Repair Café in particular:
One of the groups that has benefited from membership is Sidmouth Repair Café, which last year prevented 1.35 tonnes of waste, avoided nearly three tonnes of carbon emissions and saved consumers over £9,000 by repairing electrical items like vacuum cleaners and radios and mending clothes, bags and teddy bears – all through volunteers’ time worth nearly £16,000. The café operates on the last Saturday of every month (except August and December) from St. Francis Church Hall in Sidmouth.
“As members of the CAG Devon network, we have felt supported and encouraged,” explains Angie Carney of Sidmouth Repair Café. “Each month, a member of our team uses the simple software provided by CAG Devon to enter statistics gathered at our latest event to calculate the amazing impact we have made. Our team has really become its own lively community, and we enjoy opportunities the network provides to share our story with others thinking of setting up a repair café in their own towns or villages.”
Here we’re looking at ‘waste’, then. And the Devon Climate Emergency website is also very interested in this:
We throw away vast amounts of stuff. Even things with almost nothing wrong, which could get a new lease of life after a simple repair. The trouble is, we have forgotten how to repair things ourselves.
A Repair Café can change this! It helps to grow a community by bringing people with special skills together and pass on valuable practical knowledge. Things are being used for longer and don’t have to be thrown away. This reduces the volume of raw materials and energy needed to make new products. It cuts CO2 emissions because manufacturing new products and even recycling old ones uses energy that releases CO2.
So, lots of good reasons to pop along to the Sidmouth Repair Café this Saturday morning!