Read all about Tooting Repair Club launch, Repair Week 2025 and Leaping out of Windows without fear from local fixer Dermot…

The first rule of Repair Club is: “You do not talk about Repair club”

So like an ancient mariner of fixing…here I am – a week later and still buzzing from an energised evening in Tooting as an official partner of Repair Week, and very happy to talk about it.

First of all: it was an absolute blast to spend an evening with people either already in the repair world, or peeking into it curiously (the ‘Fixcurious’ as we have cast them).

Oh, but I’m jumping ahead. Many of you will have heard of repair cafes – there’s over 2,500 of these community ‘bring and fix’ groups worldwide – but Repair Clubs? Probably not: until last week there were just three of them, all in North London. And now the new kid, Tooting Repair Club, makes it a total of four!

What’s a Repair Club? It’s not really defined: and it’s kinda up to each club to define itself; but broadly speaking it’s a place for habitual fixers to meet, fix stuff, share and develop skills, drink tea, and eat the occasional pizza, all in a social setting. Not a too far distant relative of Mens Sheds, Stitch and Bitch or the Hacker/Makerspace movements.

As Tooting Repair Club is brand new I’m not going to presume to define it – its personality will emerge over time, formed from the people who join and drive it. So I’m going to return to the night in question: Wednesday 5th March, after a beautiful – almost t-shirt weather – late Winter’s day.  

In the midst of a cluster of curious people I’m dispensing some easy repair tips as if they’re magic tricks – I’m aware of more people coming through the front door and small groups of people gathered in animated conversations spread across the room. We’re slightly swept off our feet: pleasantly surprised by the popularity of our little Repair Club, but people have arrived even before opening time, so we’ve not finished setting up the activities… but the core team is riding the wave and going with the flow. This of course makes me an unreliable teller of this tale: I have a sense of the energy in the room, but can only catch a fraction of the conversations… however I’ll try to give a snapshot of what I’m seeing.

There’s so much curiosity in the room – the curiosity that seems endemic to fixers: and (for better or worse) is one of the core characteristics needed to fix things nowadays – we live in the information age, yet there’s never been less sharing of information by manufacturers of our everyday gadgets.- a.key resource that would open up millions of repairs.

But I should have introduced you to where we are: as I said, my script is out the window, so forgive this, but it’s not too late. We’re in Mushkil Aasaan’s community hub in Upper Tooting Road – guests of this renowned local charity started by a group of muslim women that supports families, and also generously opens their centre to a broad spectrum of community activities. Mushkil Aasaan could be described as the spiritual home of community repair in Tooting. It’s where we held our first Tooting Restart Parties back in 2014 – and this lends extra resonance to tonight’s session 

. A decade on and the change in attitudes to repair – and depth of knowledge of our guests – is palpable.

Back in the room tea is being brought round and a huge mound of locally made samosas is being wafted under our noses – it’s after dark during Ramadan, and I momentarily wonder if they taste even better when you fasted all day? But in front of me a group has gathered around the solder station, and it’s my pleasure to guide them through a fun taster session of the.essential repair skill of electronics soldering – I’m impressed how quickly they’re able to pick it up…but this is only a small section of our half day class, and I try to temper expectations and guide them to further studies…I note that there’s a high proportion of younger females.in the room: smashingbboth the tech and community repair world norms.

I told you about the first rule of Repair Club, and tonight we had a second one: no fixing  – a very tough one for fixers to agree on. We see a broken thing and are viscerally drawn to get the tools out. But Garry stood firm, and had a solution: “We just won’t have the tools on site – then we can’t fix”. A hard choice but this is a taster and engagement session, and we simply don’t have the capacity.

It was a good plan, and we had a list of future repair cafes ready to direct people to…

But like many good plans this one simply crumbles in the face of a broken and needy item in the hands of a bringer (‘Bringer’ is the popular term for people who come to repair cafes – they are certainly not ‘customers’ in any traditional sense).

And who ends up doing the bulk of repairs that evening? Yep, Garry – he finds he’d somehow packed a Leatherman multitool…so it seems there  is no such thing as a ‘get out of fixing card’. 

We are largely on an engagement and fact finding mission this evening (now with added fixing), and delighted to see roughly twenty new faces along with some old friends. Hilary is facilitating the give and gain walls with a plan for some breakout discussions later (we never get to them) – but we’re finding we had a very high match of skills needed and those offered, just amongst the thirty or so people in the room! From PAT testing to 3d printing via zip replacement.

Did I put some teaser about leaping out of windows in the title – is that what’s kept you reading? 

Leaping out of Windows (10) – less scary than you think

On October 14th this year the axe could be falling on 240m non-upgradeable Windows computers when Microsoft ends support for Windows 10.

Absorb that for a moment…240.million laptops, desktops and tablets.

But there’s a way out – and Mike at a table live demonstrating just how painless it is.

The solution – putting Linux Mint on your device – is simple and has many benefits: it’s free, it’ll speed up your computer, and it’ll almost certainly do everything you need it to – some specialised users might need to stay on Windows 10 – but Microsoft have a yearly paid subscription for you (which will inevitably end.om the next few years). 

We’re looking into running some sessions just for this – it feels like an urgent problem, but one with a solution…but a solution that’s either not known about or misunderstood as highly technical. 

And then, seemingly in the snap of fingers, three hours has zipped past and it’s time to close the Repair Club…phew!

In conclusion: we had a buzzing evening, and sensed that we’re at a tipping point in community repair,.and that there’s an appetite to pick up longer terms fixing skills,.and that these could soon just be viewed as essential life skills.

We’ve taken away a bunch of suggestions and ideas and will be back very soon with some more Repair Club dates! Coming soon! Email us at repairclub.org@gmail.com to join our mailing list or with any queries.