There are thousands of items around the home that break and need fixing, but have no precise professional expert or place of business to consult when they break. Other items just need a very simple fix that may be outside the owner’s expertise.

This is where a repair café can help. Did your favourite shirt rip and you don’t know how to sew, or your coffee maker broke?

Perhaps you have one of the first printings of a dictionary that your grandparents, William Singleton Fisher and his wife Kitty, compiled for the Ndembu people of Zambia and the binding is coming loose?

The repair café in Lover has taken all of these projects on, with numerous volunteers who all have their own expertise.

The Lover Repair Café recently celebrated its 4,000th item repaired, a pair of statues of Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck.

The worldwide repair café movement started in the Netherlands in 2009 and has since spread to 2,500 community-run locations across the world, encouraging the repair of broken items rather than their disposal, in an effort to reduce waste.

Paul Bromage, one of the founders of the Lover Repair Café, said: “What is good about this whole system is the fact that you’re recycling, keeping things going.”

The Lover Repair Café was jointly founded by Maurice Caustick and Paul in 2019 after learning of the repair café movement.

Maurice and Paul met at a Silver Surfers group that Paul founded, where they learned that both had expertise in repair work- Maurice in electrical work and Paul in woodwork.

While discussing the possibility of starting a “man-shed” so the two could work on repairs for the community together, the women of the Silver Surfers asked if something could include them.

Paul said: “So, we actually went Googling then, and literally at the café we found all about the repair café that was founded in Holland in the 90s and we thought that was the ideal thing.”

The Lover Repair Café opened on Tuesday, March 5, 2019 with around six volunteers and quickly grew to include 30 volunteers over the next few weeks, all with their own expertise in fixing different types of items.

Paul said: “They’re doing everything from computer works, electrical works, electronic works, ceramic repairs, general mechanical repairs, woodwork repairs and all that sort of stuff.”

The café’s guidance on what it can and can’t fix, is if you can carry it in, they will try.

The Lover Repair Café is open every Wednesday and Friday from 10am to 12pm at the Redlynch Village Hall, located at Vicarage Road, SP5 2PG.