Today's special Friday group run had it all - sun, litter picking, bramble clearing, post sanding, stencil painting AND a starring role in a community video!

Seven of us ran out along the Railway path (NOT cycle path - see later) to meet Celia from Up Our Street and help to create a play zone by Owen Square park.

The idea is to promote safe shared use of the space (not just cycling) by creating art and music installations that advertise this function rather than purely as 'A-B' transport that can result in some more combative attitudes between pedestrians and cyclists.

To achieve this the main group was tasked with clearing some litter to make the space more inviting and some brambles to open up the view and make it feel safer. An hour later and we had filled 7 refuse bags with rubbish and thorns and made the area a lot more pleasing.

Meanwhile, Deb and Fi worked on sanding some tagged wooden fence posts so they could be painted black and re-purposed as blackboards.

All the while we were being filmed so Up our Street could better promote their projects and engage their community. Mel did an excellent interview and we all had lots of fun faking energetic arrival and departure scenes. Hopefully we can share a link when the film is finished.

Finally, we finished off with a fun 10 minutes spray-painting stars in random arrangements on a wiggly line. There were some lovely artistic two-toned specimens and Matt's rather distinctive 'artistic statement rendered in black'.

All this was topped off with cake at Hart's Bakery. An excellent way to spend an afternoon.