The Drill Lives in the Village Hall Now: Britain’s Quiet Borrowing Revolution
Photo: Learnmore Nyoni, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons
On a damp Saturday morning in a church hall south of the river, a queue forms for a drill. Not a new drill, and not a drill for sale. This one has a queue because it is booked until Thursday, and the person at the front has brought a broken lamp to swap for a sewing machine. A volunteer writes both items into a notebook, checks a plug, and asks whether anyone has remembered the cake tin. Somebody has. It is behind the dehydrator.
This is what the borrowing economy looks like in 2026: not a grand ideological project, but a shelf of useful things and a rota of people who know how to use them. The Library of Things — the social enterprise with borrowing points around London and beyond — has helped normalise the idea that a carpet cleaner can be a shared asset. The Share Shed in Devon has been driving a mobile lending service to villages that would never sustain a permanent shop. Benthyg schemes in Wales have made borrowing part of the local vocabulary, and Edinburgh Tool Library has spent years proving that a drill does not need to live in a cupboard under the stairs.
The shelf as social infrastructure
The appeal is easy to state and harder to pull off. You need a room, insurance, a booking system, a volunteer rota and a culture of returning things clean. What you get, if it works, is a place where people bump into each other. That is the bit the spreadsheets miss. A library of things is not just a cheaper Argos. It is a low-stakes social club with a pressure washer in the corner.
In small British homes, the practical case is obvious. If you live in a flat with one cupboard and a shared hallway, a 2kg bag of plaster or a camping stove is a nuisance to own and a pleasure to borrow. A cake tin that only comes out for birthdays, a projector for a film night, a set of folding tables for a street party: these are things that spend most of their lives waiting. Lending them out is a quiet fix for our cramped housing stock and our increasingly cramped budgets.
But the deeper fix is isolation. A lot of people in Britain are not short of neighbours; they are short of reasons to talk to them. A borrowing scheme gives you one. You turn up for a ladder and leave with a recommendation for a plumber, a spare tomato plant and the name of someone who can fix a zip.
What’s actually on the shelf
The best schemes are gloriously unglamorous. Drills, sanders, sewing machines, steam cleaners, carpet cleaners, gazebos, camping gear, cake tins, dehydrators, projectors, PA systems, folding tables, pressure washers, bike repair kits, hedge trimmers, chocolate fountains, giant pans for a community curry. The odd thing is that the most borrowed items are rarely the most exciting. They are the things you need once a year, or once in a lifetime, and cannot justify buying.
There is also a useful distinction between a tool library and a library of things. Edinburgh Tool Library leans into tools: saws, sanders, ladders, the sort of kit that makes a rented flat feel less temporary. A library of things might also stock a bouncy castle pump, a label maker or a set of matching teacups. The boundary is less important than the principle: buy less, share more, keep the shelf tidy.
How to use one without making it a chore
Start with the obvious: check the membership fee and the opening hours before you fall in love with a steam cleaner. Most schemes are cheap, but they are not always convenient. Book popular items well in advance. Read the cleaning instructions. Return things on time and in the state you would want to receive them. If you borrow a drill, bring back the right bit. If you borrow a cake tin, wash it properly. If you borrow a tent, dry it before it goes back in the bag.
And if you cannot find a scheme near you, do not assume it does not exist. Ask at the library, the community centre, the church hall or the local repair café. Some of the best borrowing networks are run out of a cupboard and advertised by WhatsApp. The point is not to build a brand. The point is to build a shelf.
Starting one? Begin with a survey, not a shed
If you are tempted to start your own, resist the urge to buy twenty items and hope. Ask people what they would actually borrow. Start with ten things and a clear set of rules. Sort out public liability insurance and portable appliance testing for anything electrical. Decide how you will handle late returns, damage and cleaning. Find a partner — a library, a council, a housing association, a pub with a spare room — who can offer storage and legitimacy. Then recruit three reliable volunteers and a booking system that does not require a degree in software.
Do not start with a 3D printer. Start with a drill, a cake tin and a really good label maker. The rest will follow. Britain’s borrowing schemes are not a silver bullet for the cost of living or the loneliness epidemic. They are something more modest and more useful: a practical excuse to know your neighbours, and a way to make the things we already own work a little harder.
