In 2018, a group of volunteers started Repair Café Portsmouth, and ran monthly pop-up events at Buckland URC, Fratton, expanding to include quarterly events at Southsea Library in 2021. By 2022, it was obvious that the pilot project needed to expand to help more people repair items, and the charity ‘Share (Portsmouth)’ was born.
Our aim is to make it easier for people to reduce carbon, waste and raw material use through sharing, repairing and re-use, and initially it involves two projects. Repair Café Portsmouth allows repairers to share their skills with people who have broken objects that generally aren’t able to be repaired on the high street, and Portsmouth Library of Things helps people to borrow items that they infrequently use. Both of these help to reduce waste and carbon, as well as saving people money.
In early 2023, we opened a hub to house both projects in Cascades Shopping Centre, as a result of the generous donation of a unit by the centre owners.
