The Repair Cafe volunteers marked the 10th International Repair Day with a record breaking session at the Foxlowe Arts Centre. We welcomed in our largest ever number of visitors with a total of 56 items for repair - this beat the previous record set at Werrington in September.

It shows that there are still plenty of items out there needing repair, and it was great to see so many new faces come through the door. Since April 2025 we have seen 625 items and have an overall fix rate on-the-day of an impressive 68%; another 13% needed a replacement part and can fixed at a later Repair Cafe,

Vacuum cleaners, trousers and toasters head the list of most common items brought in.

We also hosted the fabulous 'Rescue Me' stall from Waste Savvy Staffordshire, who were supported by volunteers from Leek Food Bank. £200 was raised from the sale and presented to the Food Bank to support their essential work in the community.

We also gave our new aprons their first outing - organic, FairTrade cotton sourced from local firm Supersport on Macclesfield Road.

Read more: Repair Cafe celebrates International Repair Day

We meet every month, normally on the third Saturday. We set up our Repair Cafes in various locations across the Moorlands - see the schedule below.

All our Repair Cafes open at 10.00am and we accept items up to 1.30pm as we close at 2.00pm.

We offer refreshments at all our Repair Cafes but at the Foxlowe Arts Centre these are available at the in-house Drawing Room Cafe.

We do not charge for our time, but we do welcome donations towards our running costs, training, advertising and equipment on a pay-what-you-can basis. 

If you need a replacement part for your item, we can help you locate a part to purchase and then return to the next Repair Cafe for us to fit it for you. You will need to cover the purchase cost of the part.

Want to get involved?

We are always looking for more people to volunteer with the Repair Cafe - as a repairer, welcome host or with our publicity team. You can read our Volunteering Guide here.

Read more: Moorlands Repair Cafe - Dates for 2026

As ever, our team went on tour this summer, interspersing sessions at our regular spots, Haregate Community Centre and Foxlowe Arts Centre, with visits to Endon and Butterton in May and July, and an upcoming visit to Werrington Scout HQ on Saturday 5 September.

We had visitors from as far afield as Burslem and Oakamoor at a recent Haregate session and the good news is that there’s a new repair café now running in Ashbourne.

We continue to get lots of interesting stuff being brought in for mending each time and of course we still have the Rescue Me Pop Up stall coming to our events at the Foxlowe in Leek.

A well-deserved summer celebration was the barbecue held after the Butterton session in July.

Over 100 Repair Cafés from across the UK came together in Parliament on 25 March, to meet with MPs and call for the Government to introduce a Right to Repair. Moorlands Repair Café was there again and networked with other groups to share ideas and resources; it was so good to hear how other groups had developed and Mike came back with lots of ideas!

The event attracted 90+ MPs, including Karen Bradley MP, who pledged her support for the work we do in the Moorlands and promised to back the campaign. Dr Allison Gardner MP (Stoke South and the Villages) has also pledged to support the campaign and went further when she signed the UK Repair & Reuse Declaration at last year’s event - thank you.

This was the third year in a row that organisers of the event, Restart, had teamed up with Back Market, providers of refurbished Tech, to invite MPs to get hands on and talk about why repair and reuse matter. 

Representatives from more than 100 of the UK’s community repair groups were invited and there was a school group there with Team Repair who demonstrated how their kits are teaching young people how to repair, in addition to instances of beloved items being repaired.

Many MPs signed up to the Repair and Reuse Declaration - a number that grew during the event from 112 MPs at the start, to a whopping 143 by the end, boosted by the 91 MPs who came to the event. Many of these MPs either signed the declaration or offered to support Restart’s ongoing efforts to secure strong policy to support repair – or both.

FIND OUT MORE

The Moorlands Repair Café recently received an appeal for help from another local voluntary organisation, the Foxlowe Clay Collective, to see if we could repair a faulty Shimpo Potter's Wheel, which no longer revolved.

A thorough inspection and testing were conducted, and we concluded that the microcontroller on the motor driver board had failed. Thankfully, the motor and mechanical components were all working as expected. Repairing surface-mount components of this nature is usually beyond the skill set of our volunteers, so a replacement part was recommended.

Research discovered that Shimpo machines were imported from Japan by a local business, PotClays Ltd. of Etruria, so an email was sent to their technical department seeking their help. Further troubleshooting was advised, and they too concluded the motor driver board was dead.

Thankfully, parts were readily available, so a new driver board was purchased and promptly fitted.  After calibration, testing, and reassembly, the machine was back to full working order; a final electrical safety PAT test was completed and the unit was returned to the pottery studio.

Read more: Repair Café to the Rescue

Our Repair Café team has had another busy year as well as increasing both our membership and the services we offer. We visited Upper Tean, Butterton and Brown Edge in addition to our usual visits to Foxlowe Arts Centre and Haregate Community Centre in Leek.

Thanks to funding from the North Staffordshire Community Fund, we were able to provide electrical safety training to our team and also invited members from Biddulph Repair Café to join us at a specialist training centre in Stoke.

Read more: Latest on our Repair Cafés