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.

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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

Moorlands Repair Cafe

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: Repair Cafe - Dates for 2026 (Updated)

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

We were delighted to learn that our Repair Cafe had been successful in applying for funding from the North Staffordshire Environment fund, managed by  the Community Foundation for Staffordshire & Shropshire, to help us provide hands-on electrical safety training to our Repair Cafe team.

Our electrical repair team have previously undertaken individual Portable Appliance Testing training online, but the team wanted to get some more detailed training from a recognised electrical training provider, so that they were all working to a common standard and had practical experience of potential hazard we might find in the items brought into our Repair Cafes.

Thanks to this funding, we are now able to book training with local provider Rebus Training, based in Tunstall.

We are looking to work with our colleagues Social Connective CIC based in Biddulph, and MCA will sponsor a free place for a local young person looking to pursue a career in electrical work.

Link to grant details - https://staffordshire.foundation/grants/staffordshire-organisations/north-staffordshire-environment-fund/

My journey to becoming a Repair Café Volunteer started with an accidental conversation and I haven’t regretted a bit of it since. The Repair Café has given me what I was looking for – the opportunity to volunteer with a local organisation, meet new people and give something back to the community. Whilst attending an event at the Foxlowe, I got chatting to a lady sat next to me about an advertisement in the programme for the Leek Repair Cafe. By coincidence, she also volunteered there, and she explained what they do. It sounded just up my street; I attended the first Repair Cafe and fell in love with the idea that I could use my electronic and electrical repair skills again. So much so, that I also began volunteering with Biddulph Repair Cafe as well.

I specialise in electrical and electronic equipment repair, typically handling items such as domestic small white goods, hi-fi equipment, garden tools, domestic lighting and all manner of things in between. I particularly enjoy repairing vintage hi-fi equipment. I guess I’ve got form on this. From a very early age, I was fascinated by the way the world worked and would be constantly taking electrical and electronic items apart to examine them. I would read the Radio Spares electronics catalogues at bedtime when most other children were reading the Famous Five books. I studied electrical engineering and electronics at the University of Liverpool, moved into mobile phone manufacturing, then IT infrastructure and now IT architecture design.

Visualising the world and how machines work – and using that image to problem-solve is intensely satisfying. Unfortunately, many manufacturers now make it very difficult to repair their items, so some that come in to us are always going to be a challenge; either because service manuals are not available or the equipment relies on understanding the software that runs it. Printers, for example, are generally very challenging. However, many of the repairs I carry out are actually quite straightforward, such as replacing a fuse, a flexible cable, fitting a new plug, or re-soldering a broken wire. Without these simple fixes the item would be destined for the scrapheap, but for many manufacturers, it's often uneconomical for them to do the repair themselves; the repair cafés fill that gap and quickly breathe new life into many items.

Read more: Being a Repair Café Volunteer – Simon Rose