Welcome to the Caterham Repair Café website

Repair Cafés are free meeting places that are all about repairing things and keeping them out of landfill- clothes, furniture, electrical appliances, crockery, appliances, toys, clocks – whatever is broken, we will try to fix it.

Visitors bring their broken items from home. We will try to work out what is wrong and do our best to put it right. If we can’t fix it, we may be able to advise you where you can get it fixed.

If you have nothing to repair, you can watch what’s going on, enjoy a cup of tea or coffee and home-made cake, and perhaps get involved and offer some useful advice!

Repair Cafés are free meeting places that are all about repairing things and keeping them out of landfill- clothes, furniture, electrical appliances, crockery, appliances, toys, clocks – whatever is broken, we will try to fix it.

Visitors bring their broken items from home. We will try to work out what is wrong and do our best to put it right. If we can’t fix it, we may be able to advise you where you can get it fixed.

If you have nothing to repair, you can watch what’s going on, enjoy a cup of tea or coffee and home-made cake, and perhaps get involved and offer some useful advice!

No, the Caterham Repair Café does not operate a booking system at present, but you are advised to turn upearlier rather than later otherwise the repairers may all be occupied (or the cake may have run out).

We ask you to bring only one item per visit, in fairness to the other visitors who may have to wait – or even be turned away – due to lack of time. If you have brought another item you will be asked to rejoin the end of the queue after each item has been looked at.

Please ensure that items are reasonably clean when you bring them. We have had bad experiences from heaps of breadcrumbs from toasters and dust clouds from vacuum cleaners!

We are unable to look at items containing liquid or gas fuels for legal and/or insurance reasons (petrol garden tools, camping gas cookers and similar).

Large or heavy items! Washing machines, large furniture. We can’t deal with these in the Café but we might be able to point to someone who can, or one of our volunteers might be willing to help as a private arrangement. Please send us a detailed email (including photos if possible) to caterham.repair.cafe@gmail.com

Valuable items and antiques. Our aim is to keep things out of landfill so we are a ‘last chance’. Our volunteers are very skilled but not necessarily professionals so they can, and do, make things worse sometimes. We may, however, be able to point you towards a professional who could help.

The repairs typically take about 30 minutes to carry out. Complicated repairs and rebuilds may take substantially longer and may require facilities or equipment that are not possible to bring to the Café (eg: Some glues used in woodworking need clamping and 24 hours to set properly, some computer repairs need special diagnostics that need to run for hours). In these cases the repairer will discuss this with you.

Our volunteers are unpaid but some commonly replaced items (glues, fuses, switches) are supplied by them so please reimburse them . In the Repair Café there is a collecting jar is by the door so that satisfied visitors can make a donation, £5 is suggested for a simple repair or £10 for a bigger job but we never say no to bigger donations.

The money raised pays for the running costs (mostly insurance) of the Café and the extra is shared between The Westway and St Lawrence’s Church where we started out.

We are happy to accept cash or card donations.

We are a friendly group of keen repairers supported by our Cake-baking and  Front-of-house team members. Why not come along and see how we work?

Alternatively, if you have any questions just drop us a line on: caterham.repair.cafe@gmail.com