Restart Podcast Ep. 104: We’re ready for a repair boom at UK music festivals

Off the back of a very wet and dreary start to the year in the UK, we’re bringing memories of sunnier times to all of you. For this episode, we spoke to Clare and Frank about the repair pop-ups that they — with the help of many volunteers — ran at two festivals over the last couple of summers. 

Clare Seek is the founder of Share Portsmouth (originally Repair Cafe Portsmouth) and has been running repair events since its inception in 2018. Frank Schoofs founded Marlow Repair Cafe in the same year and has since also set up the Repair Finder. All this to say, that they have plenty of experience running community repair events and in 2024, Frank decided to take one event off the beaten track — to the Cambridge Folk Festival. 

When inspiration strikes

Frank was pushed to act by the seemingly endless piles of sleeping bags, tents, camping chairs and more that he had been seeing left behind at festivals because he knew that surely more could be done to help this massive waste issue. He did a bit of research and found that the local Cambridge Folk Festival was already doing a fair bit of work around sustainability. So, he pitched the idea of a repair tent at the next edition and that summer, it became a reality! 

“I was like, that is a cool idea. Why aren’t we doing more repair out and about because I’m always into taking things out and about and especially focusing on young people as well. I think we need our future generation to be skilled up and excited about repairing things.”

Clare, inspired by Frank’s blog post on the experience, did her own research and connected with Boomtown Fair. She gathered volunteers from around 10 different repair cafes in the Hampshire network and they brought a ‘Reparium’ to the crowd of potentially 80,000 people — a lot of them between the ages of 18 and 26. These huge crowds meant that for both repair events, they saw repair rates much higher than normal. Frank estimates that out of the 14,000 or so people that visited the Cambridge Folk Festival, they managed to help a whopping 10% of them. 

Turning broken soles into gateway repairs

Both Frank and Clare pointed out that visibility was key to the success of these repair pop-ups. They made sure to place their sites in areas of the festival with plenty of foot traffic, relying partly on people seeing the tent and then returning at a later date when disaster (aka a broken shoe) struck. Though they were both obviously well-prepared with tools and tape, it was a make do and mend attitude that prevailed for repairs over the weekend. Rather than the usual electricals that come to many regular repair events, they said that overwhelmingly the items being brought in were clothing, airbeds, sunglasses, shoes, tents, chairs, trolleys, and a few liquid damaged phones. 

We expected that it might be hard to keep people engaged with repairs with so much else going on at these festivals but what Clare realised is that when there is no other option than to repair, people will really get involved in fixing their stuff. It also helped that a lot of the repairs were really simple, providing an accessible and quick introduction to repair that she hoped would influence people’s future behaviour. 

“In our culture, we’re not really told that some repairs are really simple…we’re often talking about electrical repairs and the barriers to repair, but I think in that festival context where it’s less electrical…some of this stuff is really simple and you can learn those skills and then you can keep using them.”

At Restart, and in the repair community at large, we are always trying to find effective ways to reach new audiences — especially younger people. Frank shared that at regular events in Marlow, their attendees are predominantly 50+ years of age. However, at the festival, they helped younger people, families and people from all over the world, including visitors from a repair cafe in Belgium! What is most interesting perhaps is that at both festivals, almost all visitors to the repair pop-ups had not heard of a repair cafe before but absolutely loved the idea. 

Clare believes the key to reaching these new audiences is about going to new people not expecting them to come to us. She has taken the same approach by recently bringing community repair events to the University of Portsmouth and connected with younger people on their level. This includes talking to them about campaigning for the Right to Repair and providing them tangible options to take action to tackle one of their biggest concerns, the climate crisis.  

Tough tape and trickle down action

In the same way that Frank originally inspired Clare to take community repair to new places, they both hope that listeners and organisers will be moved to do the same. They share some tips and tricks on how to get booked to repair at a festival, what the essential items are for mending and fixing on site, and how best to organise volunteers for these events. We also talk about what unusual places they might want to take repair next, including schools and workplaces. And the key takeaway for us: the volunteers loved helping out at the events and they’re in high demand. And if anyone at Glastonbury Festival is listening, get in touch!

Before we go, we also wanted to give an exciting announcement. This October will be the 10th edition of International Repair Day and to celebrate, our theme will be all about how repair unites us. We’re encouraging groups worldwide to throw a celebration — a repair festival if you will — to mark the occasion. This could be as big as a multi-day event with musical performances and more while people repair, or simply your regular repair event but run in collaboration with a new community in your area (think Scouts or a lending library). We can’t wait to share more in the coming months!

Links:

• Please fill in our podcast listener survey to help us keep improving this show
• Read Frank’s original blog post about Cambridge Folk Festival
• BBC: The Boomtown repairers fixing campers’ broken gear
• Share Portsmouth
• The Repair Finder

[Images courtesy of Clare Seek/Share Portsmouth and Frank Schoofs/Marlow Repair Cafe]

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