In a large, glass-fronted building just a stone’s throw from London’s bustling Waterloo station, Londonites are busy putting their hands to work and learning how to make furniture.

Alison Winfield-Chislett, high-end designer and founder of the Goodlife Centre in central London, welcomes people from all walks of life to her independent learning space to teach them how to design, make and fix something with their own hands. “I wanted the place to be a ‘catch all’ for wholesome activities that make us feel ‘good’ – by taking us away from our keyboard lives, offering workshops that make us use our hands and involve learning by doing, as well as connecting people of like minds.

“I’ve always made things and I’ve always had a workshop – I think of it as being more important than my living room. But some people don’t have access to the tools they need to make and fix things, and if they do, they may not necessarily have the confidence and the independence to use them. So about two years ago, I started the Goodlife Centre, an independent learning space, to teach them those things. We began with just one course, ‘Tools for the Terrified’.”

Set up to help people feel comfortable with tools, the course proved very popular, and the centre has now grown to include 32 feepaying courses running seven days a week, from workshops on furniture upholstery to plumbing, tiling and DIY.

As well as the courses, the GoodlifeCentre hosts ‘repair cafés’, free community events that help people fix their household items, two or three times a year. “I read an article in the New York Times about a repair café in the Netherlands and I thought to myself, I’ve got all those tools and I know lots of makers, we can host them at the Goodlife Centre. The first one was about this time last year.”

Promoted on the Goodlife Centre’s website and social media accounts, the cafés have helped provide a solution to those who want to extend the life of products they cherish, rather than throwing them away.

“There’s no shortage of people coming – we fixed about 25 things in three hours the last time we held it. We advise people on what glue or equipment they need. It’s not like a repair service, it’s an educational service. My top tip would be to fix an item as soon as you notice that something is wrong with it, don’t leave it to get worse – ‘a stitch in time saves nine’ as they say.”

Items brought in for repair include wobbly chairs, expandable tables, lamps, fridges and small electrical items. The Goodlife Centre helps provide fixes for the ‘analogue’ items (as Winfield-Chislett calls them), whereas ‘digital’ items, such as electrical and electronic equipment (EEE), are repaired with the help of volunteers from the Restart Project.

Founded by Ugo Vallauri and Janet Gunter, the Restart Project is a charity that encourages the repair of EEE to extend its working life – exemplified through its catchy motto ‘Repair, don’t despair!’ Inspired by the prevalence of repair and reuse in developing countries, the Restart Project not only helps out at ‘repair cafés’ but also offers free community events of its own, called ‘restart parties’ where volunteer amateur and professional repairers, known as ‘restarters’ help others learn how to mend and properly maintain their broken or slow devices.

“We’ve become as Western consumers very impatient and demanding in terms of time, so we want something to be fixed immediately otherwise we might consider recycling it and getting a new one. I do understand that people are pressed for time, but some things are easily fixable”, Vallauri tells me.

“Our events are absolutely free and we see them not really as a way of providing a free repair, but more as an opportunityto help people troubleshoot their devices and learn how to fix them. Our ‘restarters’ might not have fixed that specific problem in the past, but they will take the time to look at what the problem is and try to solve the issue. Everyone is learning from one another.”

Some of the most frequently brought in items for repair are printers and laptops, with common problems often being surprisingly easy to fix: “All of us have had a bad printer experience and we tend to just accept that they’re broken – but usually, the problem with a faulty printer [be that smudging or paper jamming] is just dirt. Quite a number of people have regained use from a printer they had sitting around unused just through some simple cleaning. It’s giving them the guidance to say, ‘It’s okay to open up your equipment’ and showing them that it’s not a scary task.”

Photo: Janet Gunter for the Restart Project

Restart parties run by the project are all within the Greater London area, but the project is now mobilising a much wider network of ‘restarters’, or coaching those interested in running similar events, across the country and overseas. There are already branches in the Peak District, Manchester and Italy, and the charity has had enquiries from Canada, South Africa, France and Spain about setting up groups there. “The repair movement is really multiplying. It shows how big the need for repair is”, Vallauri says.

One way to satisfy this need is through increased governmental support, says Vallauri (though Winfield- Chislett is less vocal: “I make soapboxes, I don’t stand on them”, she tells me). Suggestions include giving repairers cheaper rents for high-street stores or providing residents with a guide to local repairers.

“I’ve not come across any council in the UK that produces a guide to all the repair shops and repair options in their territory, while we always findthat they will produce guides or share information on recycling centres or opportunities”, says Vallauri. This is somewhat surprising, given WRAP’s recent report that found that 23 per cent of EEE put out for recycling is either already fit for resale and reuse, or requires only minor repairs before it could be resold – an untapped coffer of almost £220 million.

The Restart Project is eager to help councils and their relevant partners to take advantage of this: “We see our operation as a great potential source of inspiration for councils and waste management companies as we can help them realise the value of diverting waste away from their recycling centres (thus saving them money in disposal fees). Recycling a product that can still be used, no matter how responsibly, is still less efficient and more wasteful than extending its life. So we feel that we should be trying to create support for an economy of repair, which reduces our environmental footprint.”

Of course, there are some problems that just can’t be fixed – and often this is a problem of built-in obsolescence. Article 4 of the WEEE Directive mentions that member states should ensure manufacturers ‘do not prevent, through specific design features or manufacturing processes, WEEE from being reused’, unless it provides ‘overriding advantages’ to protecting the environment or human health. The issue, Vallauri says, is that it doesn’t mention repair directly.

“We should not accept the sale of products that are not repairable – it’s contrary to any common sense. We should enforce discussion involving manufacturers that if they want to sell products they should try as much as possible to create easily repairable items. If they did, manufacturers would be happy because people would buy their products, people would be happy because they could fix their products, and government [and the rest of the world] would be happy because we are all creating less waste.”

Bringing repair back into common practice is paramount to both the Goodlife Centre and the Restart Project: “Making things is a fundamental part of our makeup”, says Winfield-Chislett. “We’re human beings, we’re toolmakers as a species. It’s sad that so many people have lost touch with that, and we need to return to making repair normal practice.”