From the archive
30 Sep 2026
The money problem comes first, so it may as well open the story. A large share of what it costs to run the Restart Project's five Fixing Factories comes from a single National Lottery Community Action Fund grant, and from May next year that grant is cut back hard. The organisation's response is not a rescue plan but a request for introductions, sent out to everyone who has ever passed through its doors.
What that money currently buys is five neighbourhood repair rooms across London, each one run by and for the patch it sits in. Thousands of local people have taken part since the network grew, and most report feeling more rooted in their area afterwards - Ester, who volunteers, is offered as one story among many. Every year the factories return hundreds of electrical items to service, which means less material heading to waste, less carbon embodied in replacements, and households keeping cash they would otherwise have spent on new kit.
None of this existed before August 2022, when the first factory opened with its organisers excited and slightly apprehensive about whether the idea would hold up in practice. Arthur, who wrote the funding announcement, has led the programme for nearly a year and came to the post from managing the workshop at the Hackney site - the project tends to promote from its own benches. The belief now is that a permanent repair space is a model other towns could copy.
So the net has been cast wide. Waste firms with social-value obligations in their contracts, funders after visible circular-economy work, councils that might host sessions or open a factory of their own, technology businesses interested in scaling - and, failing all that, any friend, relative, neighbour or colleague of a supporter who could make a single useful introduction. The three years since 2022 answered the easy question. People show up to fix things. The unanswered one is who pays the rent on the room.
A repair space needs premises before it needs anything else. Councils keep lists of empty high-street units and waste contractors carry social-value obligations in their contracts - ask both before asking a funder. The volunteers, on this evidence, arrive once the doors are open.
The Restart Project · Read the source