Our Story
In 2018, our founder members, Paul and Maurice, got to know each other as part of a group of people who were learning how to use computers.
They both had something in common.
They both wanted to do more to help the local community. They looked around for something that would challenge them and discovered the Repair Café Organisation.
They founded the Lover Repair Café in March 2019. Since then, we’ve met as a Café every Wednesday and Friday morning in the Redlynch Village Hall – even throughout the pandemic.
In June 2024 we opened a second monthly repair Café in Downton opening on a Saturday to make the Café services available to a wider audience.
We didn’t even let Covid stop us working.
We worked throughout the Pandemic by changing how we work.
In a traditional Repair Café, the visitor sits beside the repairer and they both work on the item being repaired together – the aim being to help the visitor learn about repairing. However, the restrictions during the pandemic stopped all this and we had to re-think how we worked.
We modelled ourselves on the BBC’s The Repair Shop TV show, where people drop off their jobs, we repair them and then they collect them – all at a safe distance. This worked, and it is a model we continue to this day.
We believe we were the only Repair Café in the UK to do this.