It's not often a task finishes before it's begun, but due to an early finish to the youth gig and typically efficient work by the Hanwell Hootie volunteers and Goodgym, we were home 5 minutes before the task was meant to start!

Following a successful gig organised by the Terry Marshall Academy, featuring rising star singer-songwriter Michael Hill, Steph and I sprang into action and stacked the chairs in the hall in quick time. Then it was off to the kitchen to put the empties into the bin and tow the leftover drinks to a storage area. Before long, Sevan and Kash joined us to super charge the tidy up and we were done in no time. Everyone was happy to get home early, not least one of the volunteers who had been there since 7am!

Ahead of the Hanwell Hootie main event on the 9th of May, there were 2 warm up sessions today. One was for the volunteers, to brief them ahead of the big day and the second was a Youth Stage, giving a show case to bands from the Terry Marshall Academy. Both were taking place in the Hobbayne Centre and GoodGym were on hand to set up the main hall for the 2 different events.

Cool Runnings

Essential for the Youth Stage was to have a working bar and essential for a successful bar was to have ice. There was no ice, so Iram went on a supermarket run with a Hobbayne member. They stocked up the freezer and the beer buckets, ensuring that perfectly chilled drinks would be served to the gig goers.

Centre Stage

Kash, Steph and Sevan were tasked with setting out seats for the volunteers. they had to guesstimate where the stage, bar and walkways would be. The stage was the biggest problem. One of the organisers imagined where the drummer, guitarists would be positioned and where the singer would stand centre stage. The first row of seats was positioned around that, with the team setting out the chairs in semi-circles, so that it would feel like a mini theatre.

Setting a High Bar

With the bar drinks chilling on ice, someone tall had to put the BAR sign up to attract the punters. As the tallest person on site, Steph took on the job, stretching high to place the sign out of reach of any flying beer glasses.

Voluntees Table

At the other end of the hall, Iram was helping to line up the t-shirts for volunteers. They each had names stuck to them and were grouped by size. It was a great system, except that the tables were way too small for the number of volunteers and t-shirts. That meant that Iram had to organise and shuffle the groups a lot. The GoodGymers made Iram's task a little bit easier by taking their own tees home, freeing up precious space.

Banner Manner

The final task for Kash, Steph and Sevan was to get the freshly delivered banners for the Terry Marshall Academy displayed inside and outside the hall. There were a lot of cable ties available. They still needed to work out how to use them creatively to show off the banners in the best way possible battling to get the hanging without folds or overlaps. Speaker brackets, dumbbells and railings were all called into action to make sure the signs stayed up and stayed visible, with the end result looking pretty professional and not at all put together by a bunch of (talented) amateurs.

Back In Black

After all of the fun today, GoodGym will be back after dark to tidy up again. They'll be removing all signs of the sensible volunteers and wild rock and roll that took place in the hall today.

Goodgym Ealing : we know what you did last April in Hanwell!!Yes and we were up to it again at the Hanwell stables. Conor, Sevan and Steph Ducat ran in the streets of sunny Ealing to Hanwell to meet Breda, Harvey and Maria who were waiting outside the stables. Andrea was here to open the stables so that we could do what we did last year - this is not a horror film but the scene would be perfect as poor lighting inside, loads of cobwebs and spiders, loads of branches lying around, abandoned sofas, chairs etc...creepy but we were safe.

Task was to move all sofas and chairs outside and give them a wipe, but also for Andrea to assess which ones would be used at the Hanwell Hootie this year. At one stage we had a human chain getting the green chairs from under the stairs. Maria helped Andrea upstairs for a while to tidy some items ...we think they went for a small nap.

We had the vintage leather chairs, the down to earth sofa(no legs), the psychologist(speak to me Harvey), the 3 legged sofa, the comfy sofa(Steph sofa surfing), the nature sofa(green leather sofa), the spring chair(iron springs), the matching cushion chair and some others with legs going haywire.

Once all cleaned we played Sofa Tetris as needed to put them back in the middle section of the stables ready for the festival next month. Sofa La Vista, Baby and we will be back!!

If you live in the Ealing Borough, you might have heard about one day in May when the whole town of Hanwell turns into a massive gig space with pubs, community hubs and green spaces hosting performances of young talent and more established artists. Yes, I’m talking about the Hanwell Hootie, the largest free one-day festival in London, celebrating Hanwell’s legendary link to Jim Marshall, the inventor of the amplifier. GoodGym Ealing is proud to support this fully volunteer-led event year after year.

This Tuesday night, Conor, Sevan and Kash ran 3.7 km to the Stables in Brent Lodge Park in Hanwell for the first Hootie task of 2026. Maria cycled to the session from Chiswick, and Harvey walked to meet the group at the task location. June and Andrea, the volunteers and planners behind the Hootie, were already there, waiting to share with GoodGymers their discovery.

The lack of electricity to light up the indoor of the Stables wasn’t a surprise, but a large pile of tyres stacked inside was! The unexpected stack was obstructing the way to pull out and clean the festival furniture, so the whole team had to think fast on their feet and redirect their energy to removing the obstacle: carrying, rolling, or flipping the tyres to the backyard.

With less time left to deal with the festival sofas and chairs in need of tidying, June and Andrea decided that the best use of the time would be unrolling and cleaning the Hootie banners - some of them really huge! When Maria and Conor unfolded the largest of the banners, it turned out that what was printed on it had no relevance to this year’s Hootie: Marshall’s diamond jubilee. The team uncovered a few more out-of-date posters, which June classified as legacy and recommended putting aside. A big win was discovering the Hootie on the Meadow banner as the 2026 festival was making a comeback to that large outdoor venue after a couple of year’s absence.

After an hour at the Stables, two tasks had been completed, and the runners were ready to set off for the run back to Ealing Broadway, just as the night settled over Ealing. Luckily, we’ve booked a follow-up session with Andrea in advance, so next week we’ll come back to Hanwell to deal with the dusty Hootie furniture. Sign up now!

Once upon a time, Los Mariachis from GoodGym travelled through the Ealing Borough and arrived in the town of Hanwell, hoping to find work at music festivals. Have they found any jobs? If you visited Sandy Park in the morning after Hanwell Hootie, you could find six red t-shirts lounging on sofas, getting a lift in vans, and all that accompanied by the whiff of a brewery! What sort of a gym is that? A gym unlike any other!

It was the first GoodGym gig for Roberta, who hadn't known what to expect. The first words Roberta said on arrival were:

How can I help?

And she got stuck in right away!

The regular GoodGymers expected to pack things away and dismantle the festival tents - basically: what they had done on Friday, but in reverse. That wasn't the plan though. Task owner June told our team that the priority was moving the Hootie furniture back to the Stables in Brent Lodge Park. We have done it in two van trips, loading and unloading sofas, armchairs, mirrors, bins, banners and a stand looking like a chromium-plated sombrero, perfect for such a Mariachi as Harvey. Some of us were so desperados to complete the task for our Hootie amigos, that we made an exception and got a lift to the Stables for the sake of time. Runners Steph Ducat, Sevan and Kash didn't miss a chance to race the van back to Sandy Park though!

There was one more journey that the Hootie volunteer manager Rose had for us: a trip to the Viaduct pub. That was the task from which some of us emerged with the beer scent. Did we go there for a few pints? Much more than a few! We packed into a van and unpacked crates, boxes and bags of reusable festival pint glasses - hundreds of them! This time everyone walked between locations, much to Michelle's linking as she is very keen on walking to the tasks.

Steph and Harvey took on a bonus quest, also related to popping into a pub: this time The Green. They were tasked with carrying two giant letters "H" there, ahead of a thank you event for the amazing Hootie volunteers crew. Who else if not GoodGym can do a fun pub crawl with no drinking involved?

When Kash arrived at Sandy Park to offer GoodGym services to the legendary Hanwell Hootie festival, she not only had to wait for her crew, who were busy decorating the Busking Boat, but also for The Van. The van was supposed to deliver festival tents. Sevan and Harvey had the pleasure of waiting for that vehicle at their previous task to no avail, so the hype was on!

Our Bunting Bandits just returned from the cruise on the Busking Boat when the van materialised. Three GoodGymers helped Ralph, the Head of Tentology, put up one pop-up tent, then hung around trying to make themselves useful while watching Ralph fighting with the zips in an attempt to connect the tent walls. The rescue came quickly in the form of another task: setting up a uri-tunnel. Forget GoodGym Ealing's expertise in polytunnel architecture! Uri-tunnels are the future.

The team was tasked to shift three portable urinals and connect them, creating a tunnel to allow men some privacy on the festival day. Some male GoodGymers felt that the end-users of the urinals were underrepresented in the design of the tunnel and came up with some ideas to improve the practicality of the solution. The consultation was soon over and their feedback didn't make it to the final urinals setup. The team followed the original design, then Harvey made an inaugural run through the tunnel.

After the pisstraction, the GoodGymers were called to support another tent setup, where 10 pairs of hands were needed. Following the success of that large-scale project, Ralph invited them to assemble another 10-men tent. It turned out that the grandiose tent was an overkill for a spot selling festival merch, so it was reduced in size by a half.

The last job for Harvey, Sevan and Kash was to move black chairs and tables from the VIP area to the volunteer lounge - they did not fit June's vision of the Sandy Park festival layout. We all knew that the Hootie volunteers were the real VIPs, so we moved the cool, black furniture where it belonged.