The great DIY revival: meet the people who’ll try to fix

A new repair subculture is flourishing across the UK. Meet the experts and tinkerers sharing lost skills to make do and mend

I’ll need your sewing fingers for this one, Jean,” says volunteer fixer Richard Pope. He peers into the belly of a 1970s Grundig analogue radio, as Jean delicately knots the thread that provides the tension for the radio’s frequency dial. “It’s been stuck on Radio 2 for years,” Jean confides, “and I can’t stand all the shouting now that Vanessa [Feltz] has left the breakfast show.” A few seats away, cancer research scientist and “happy tinkerer” Callum Hall, 30, teaches civil servant Madeleine, 24, how to revive her DeLonghi coffee maker (“You don’t want to mess about with compressed steam and electricity,” he admits), as locals queue with toasters, TVs and battery-operated kids’ toys balanced on their laps.

The volunteer-run repair café at community centre St Margaret’s House in Bethnal Green, London, is one of 580 such events operating across the UK. Repair cafés form the backbone of a flourishing nationwide repair subculture inspired by a movement that began with Repair Café de Meevaart, which launched in Amsterdam in 2009.