Nunhead Repair Cafe

I’m visiting repair cafés to see how other people do it. Our home base, Mend it with Mo, is a one-man enterprise, on a Monday lunchtime. Sometimes there are few people, sometimes there’s a queue.  I decided to take my kettle to The Nunhead repair Café in South London. I got to know about them through Instagram, and realised that they had lots of menders, including textile, woodwork, and technology. They are at The Green in Nunhead, one Saturday a month.  There was already a queue when I got there, and I got a cuppa from the café while I waited. There are two people who welcome you and put up a post-it with your place in the queue and the nature of the repair, and then you wait and watch as items of all sizes and shapes progress through the tables of repairers.  Once I was called, I found myself at a table with 3 repairers. There was a radio on one side and a speaker on the other side. My kettle’s on/off switch wouldn’t stay down. All the time the 3 repairers shared tools, compared notes, and after a bit two of them swopped, as their skills were better matched to the object. I found myself with a cheerful, curious, and imaginative guy, who turned out to be an Art School technician. We all puzzled over the kettle, me out of interest but with zero knowledge. At a certain point there was nothing for it but to experiment. My repairer asked me if it would be OK to take a chunk out of the casing. No-one knew why, but the switch worked without the casing and not with it on. Mo always says – if it’s already broken then you can’t make it worse, so in that spirit I said yes to the experiment. He carved a big doorway out of the casing, put it all back with a judicious blob of glue, and it worked. None of us know why, but it was a joyful spirit of adventure and experiment that got us there.  This is not to underestimate the huge amount of skill and knowledge in that room, but something repairers seem to have, and we think needs celebrating loudly, is curiosity and optimism. It’s a very creative thing to do.