We had a great turn out on bank holiday Monday. Together we filled wheelbarrows with sand and delivered them (along with rake puns) to complete the path through the woods.

9 GoodGymers made a real difference at Kentish Town City Farm!

This lovely group — Caitlin, Deirdre, Emily, Giulia, Jacqui, Karen, Lydia, Matt, and Pritika — caught a well-spent and community-filled morning at Kentish Town City Farm on Sunday!

Together they got everything ready for the Farm's annual May Day celebrations!

💚 Karen and Giulia cleaned fences and took them up to the top field!

💚 Emily and Matt carried an animal cage up to the top field and almost got lost!

💚 Deirdre, Lydia, Pritika, and others helped carry tables a long way!

💚 And everyone hung up bunting!... alongside saying hello to the animals 🐷

Thank you, everyone! And thank you, Emily, for the photos and report!

This week's task was led by fellow GoodGymer, Paul, who had signed up to the Surfers Against Sewage Million Mile Clean - equipping us with some professional litter-picking garb and turning us into bona fide citizen scientists. The mission? To clear (a corner of) Finsbury Park of litter, and play a bit of brand bingo - submitting data on which brands were littering our park.

Steph Ducat, Louise, Da Marcus, and Mehmet ran down from Arsenal Community Hub together, meeting the others at the South East gates of Finsbury Park to get started on the task.

Since becoming a run leader, I've wanted to re-start the old warm-up ritual of doing a register, each person saying their name and then answering a random question. Finally, it began last night - and with a question that turned out to be more apt than I'd realised: "what's your favourite drink?".

Paul, who's preferred tipple is JD & Coke, managed to find not one but three (sadly empty) bottles of Jack Daniels littered around the park's borders; and Louise, who favours Strongbow Dark Fruits, also hit her jackpot, as did Da Marcus with a can of Iced Tea. Sadly I didn't find any kombucha bottles littered around Finsbury Park... 😆

We were treated to an incredible red sunset, and even attracted some questions from other park users about how they could get involved and host similar litter picks in their areas.

Altogether we collected 5 sacks of litter, collectively walking 5.6 miles as we picked - in Paul's words: "legendary stuff 🙌🏻!"

There was lots of excitement for next week's session building paths in Caledonian Park - see you there?

Last night's task was a true workout, carrying sleeper after sleeper down to the bottom of the garden, ready to be used to construct a stage for the annual Olden Community Garden music festival.

It took 6 GoodGymer's to lift and lug each sleeper, and a lot of good communication and coordination to avoid any disastrous injuries. We didn't quite fulfill Charles' high ambition of relocating the entire pile, but after shifting 9 sleepers, I think it's fair to say we'd all had a good work out and felt pretty pleased with ourselves. I can certainly feel it in my arms today!

Great work to Jennifer for getting stuck in on her first session (welcome!). Aside from some seeing many faithful GG Islington regulars, it was great to meet Denzel from GG HQ, and Ernestas, local coucillor and long-time GG-er.

See you at Finsbury Park next week!?

Last night's session saw 9 GoodGymers roll up at Elizabeth House Community Centre, helping to stack chairs, clean tables, and sweep the floor after their foodbank in record time. Although I'm not sure we managed to rid the floor of every sparkle of glitter!

As is often the case with this task - we were rewarded with surplus bread and veg to take home (has anyone tasted those mustard seeds?! They're fiery!!)

5 GoodGymers took a gentle 2.5 km run to get there too - although we all bailed out of the run back, opting instead to head directly home to cook up our leeks and munch on our bread, much to the disappointment of Luke who really wanted to witness me running laps of the stadium with 2 leeks and a baguette in tow... next time!