Following early success of the Swanage and Purbeck Repair Cafe after its relaunch, a new repair, refresh and reuse event has been organised to take place in Wareham, Dorset.
The environment group Sustainable Wareham is hosting the town’s first repair cafe and clothes swap on Saturday 8th November 2025 in a joint project with the Swanage and Purbeck Repair Cafe team, Purbeck Youth Group, and Wareham Lions.
Repair, refresh, reuse – those are the aims of repair cafes
New lease of life for broken items
Volunteers from the Swanage and Purbeck Repair Cafe will be at the Wareham Youth and Family Hub in Worgret Road with some of their talented volunteer fixers, ready to bring broken items back to life.
The Repair Cafe will offer locals the chance to give their broken items a new lease of life, from clothes and jewellery to bikes, laptops, and small household appliances.
Purbeck Youth Club will lead the clothes swap, encouraging young people to embrace affordable, sustainable fashion, and setting up a creative corner to show visitors how to upcycle old garments into something fresh, such as turning T-shirts into tote bags, or patching up denim.
The Wareham event will sit alongside Sustainable Wareham’s Rethinking Rubbish collection, which runs earlier the same morning at Not Just Sundaes, where visitors can drop off recycling and declutter their wardrobes.
Swanage and Purbeck Repair Cafe meets monthly in Herston Village Hall
“Plan to run more over the next 12 months”
Vicky Charles, chair of Sustainable Wareham, says it is a pilot for future activities in the town and added:
“This is our first repair cafe in Wareham, and we’re relying on the expertise of the Swanage team to show us the way.
“We received a grant from the Co-op Community Fund to support our ongoing Rethinking Rubbish initiative, and if this event goes well, we plan to run more repair cafes and clothes swaps over the next 12 months.
“To help us plan, we’d love to know what visitors plan on bringing along, so please get in touch in advance if you can – and if you have practical skills to share, we’re always happy to welcome new volunteers to the team!
“It’s all about bringing people together to make sustainability fun, social and practical. Whether you’re fixing, swapping or learning, everyone’s welcome.”
Swanage and Purbeck Repair Cafe has a good success rate of mending small electricals
“A true success story”
Stephen Rawlins, chair of the Swanage and Purbeck Repair Cafe, said:
“Since our launch earlier this year, our fixers have taken great satisfaction in putting their skills to work for the community, especially when restoring treasured, sentimental belongings. We’re excited to help bring the same hands on, feelgood format to Wareham.
“The idea of repair cafes is a true success story and they are growing in popularity all the time. We have been running since spring 2025 and Vicky of Sustainable Wareham got to hear about us and asked us to join in with their event.
“We try to meet one Saturday morning every month up at Herston village hall – we would like to be more central, but Swanage is such a busy town that hall space on a Saturday is like gold dust!
“We are hoping that we might be able to move to the Focus Centre once they have finished their refurbishments, but that’s one for the future.”
Sewing skills are not just for clothes – a much loved penguin toy gets a new lease of life
“Our latest event was buzzing”
Stephen added:
“We hold a two hour meeting for a quick burst of fixing and interest is growing in the group all the time. We are collecting more and more followers on our Facebook page, and attendance at our monthly meeting is driven by word of mouth, especially from people we are able to help out!
“Our latest event was buzzing, we had a steady flow of people visiting us. We have around 30 fixers on our books and about 10 or 12 come in every month, including a strong sewing group who repair clothes and soft toys, and someone who is able to fix bikes.
“We can also repair furniture, small electrical items and jewellery – we like to think we are up for tackling anything people bring along, though it is useful to know in advance what we might see, so that we can have the right experts along and do some homework on possible faults first.
“Our most successful repair was with a sewing machine, when I put a question about its fault on a forum and had a member of a repair cafe in Australia suggest how to fix it – and we got it working perfectly straight away!”
The repair cafe is always looking for new volunteers to add to its bank of fixers
Even giving advice on house plants
Swanage and Purbeck Repair Cafe’s next meeting will be at Herston village hall in Jubilee Road, Swanage, from 10.30 am until 12.30 pm on Saturday 29th November 2025, offering repairs to textiles, clothing, bicycles, and small electricals – and even advice on house plants.
The group also carries out PAT safety testing and is always on the lookout for new volunteers with practical skills.
Sustainable Wareham’s first repair cafe and clothes swap is on Saturday 8th November 2025 at the Wareham Youth and Family Hub, Worgret Road, from 12 noon to 2 pm.
Items it can tackle include small electricals such as toasters, lamps, and radios, wooden furniture like chairs, drawers, and stools, clothing and textiles, fixing tears, zips, and buttons, and basic repairs and maintenance on bicycles. It is unable to mend microwaves, televisions or anything hazardous.
Getting ready to repair, or even create at the Clothes Swap in Wareham
Further information
- More about Sustainable Wareham
- More from Swanage and Purbeck Repair Cafe is on its Facebook page
