Tideswell Repair Café – Big Fix 2025

The BIG FIX annual event was back, bigger and better than before with over 100 Repair Cafés and over 800 volunteers taking part nationwide during the month of May. The BIG FIX has one aim – to fix and breathe new life into as many broken things as possible.

Tideswell & District Repair Café supported The BIG FIX 2025 by holding a Repair Café on Saturday 17th May. We had 48 visitors at the event and repaired 32 items, gave advice on 14 others to rescue them, only condemning 4 items as non-repairable. Thus we saved an estimated 260 kg of CO2e from being released into the atmosphere and 35 kg of waste from being dumped in landfill.

Everyone is met by our friendly and helpful Meet & Greet volunteers to explain how it all works and guide people through the simple process.

Of course, there were tasty cakes, bakes and biscuits served alongside cups of tea and coffee by our volunteers in the café! You can just drop in to find out more and have a cuppa with us even if you don’t have an item for repair or want to ask if we can help with something.

All this for whatever donation people can afford and think is fair for their repairs and refreshments.

Coordinated by Devon County Council, the BIG FIX hopes to encourage people to repair broken items, pass on skills for people to fix their own items, help people save money and keep items out of landfill. At Tideswell & District’s Repair Café our enthusiastic and capable repairers will show people how their items work, what has gone wrong and how they might do their own repairs in future. We have had some youngsters sit alongside as well, to learn more about how things work—repairers of the future, perhaps!

You can find out more about Tideswell & Repair Café at www.tdeg.org.uk or Facebook https://www.facebook.com/TideswellRepairCafe