A nice, festive session last night! We were helping out Beckenham Park Care Home with some decorating.

First up, some of us met at the Bridge House (and shared our fave xmas tunes), a few people met at Shortlands Station and a few made their own way to the task.

It was a pretty long run for most of us (4.5k!) but a good way to warm up on a freezing cold night.

When we arrived, we were assigned to different parts of the care home to add festive flourishes:

🎄 Decorating a tree

🌿 Adding fake greenery to the stairs

🍽 Spicing up the dinner tables

🎀 Putting up beads and ribbons around photo frames and on the dog (see pic)

It was good to do an inside task in that weather although I'm not sure most of us expected somewhere so fancy...!

We smashed through it all in half an hour and went our separate ways.

Nice one team! 💪

For our second Tuesday evening Bromley sesh (🥳) we were at Southlands Road Allotments. Local sustainability charity Greener and Cleaner have inherited a space which they're turning into a community garden. There's a few fruit trees, a shed of sorts, a compost and not much else. The plan is to turn it into a thriving growing space where the local community can learn to grow and eat fresh fruit and veg! 🥕

Can you dig it?

Job one was digging a hole for a massive metal container. It's going to become an accessible growing bed but first needed cementing in place.

Gettin' twiggy with it

Meanwhile we needed to transfer loads of the twigs and branches from the top of the compost heap into the metal container. These will have compost added and then rot down.

Bottling it

Whilst this was happening, Jo and Clare were cutting up huge plastic bottles into a specific shape so that they can become strawberry pots!

Nailing it

The majority of the materials used for the community garden are repurposed and upcycled. Stephen was removing nails from some pallet wood using a hammer.

Cracking job team! 👍 Thanks for sharing your favourite veg and your energy to get this community green space up and running 💪 Special shoutout to Jo who attended her first GG sesh! Welcome to the gang.

Our new Tuesday evening sessions certainly started with a bang. 16 people turned up to help out local sustainability charity Greener & Cleaner with some lifting and shifting and decorating etc. ahead of their big Christmas Fair event next weekend.

A few of us met in Beckenham, ran via Shortlands to pick up a few more and then made our way up the hill to meet a few more people outside the Hub. 😅

After whipping through the instructions we'd been set, our incredibly organised bunch got to work:

📌 Putting up a 'Greener Christmas' banner

🧵 Relocating the sewing machines

🧣 Boxing up all the handmade goods

📚 Bagging the books

📦 Moving a load of boxes

👇 Taking mannequins, bags and boxes etc. to the storage room downstairs

Not bad for 30 minutes or so!

Massive shout-out to everyone who joined us for their first GoodGym session: Nerinder, Laura, Alan, Amy, Holly, Adam, Marie and Michael and props to everyone else who came along 👏

GoodGym Bromley & Lewisham joined forces for a spooktacular evening of painting at the Young Lewisham Project

Our fangtastic Bromley contingent kicked off at the Bridge House as per, discussed our best ever fancy dress outfits (some serious efforts from everyone!) and hit the road for a grand 3.5km jog to the Young Lewisham Project.

The Lewisham team and the rest of the Bromley gang were already there getting stuck in. It was like a hair salon - rollers and brushes were everywhere.

The outside of the building was being painted a ghoulish grey . We grabbed the gear and got cracking, not getting toooo much paint on ourselves/the ground. It turns out we have some very neat decorators in our midst.

Whilst we got tidied up a few GoodGymers had a wee tour of the building, being shown the various workshops that young people are able to use - it's an amazing place.

We took a group snap and hit the road home.

Massive shout out to Kelly for attending her first GG sesh and cheers Harry and Stephen for back-marking duties!

Luckily dogs don’t much mind the rain – and their owners are a hardy bunch too – so frequent showers and wet ground did little to dampen determination to win prizes at this year’s Paws in the Park event. Linda spent the afternoon helping on fundraising stalls and admiring the pooches – her favourite dog show category, “best ears” – and Hannah and Laura joined in time to see the final rosettes being handed out, followed by a big team effort to dismantle gazebos and tidy Cator Park before darkness fell.

The original date for this popular event was cancelled due to September’s extreme heatwave so for the Friends of the Park organisers, the recent heavy rainfall is yet another reminder of the impacts of climate change – making their ongoing efforts to enhance local green spaces even more important. Currently the Friends are coordinating fundraising by residents and businesses to bring a Tiny Forest to Cator Park, a project in which 600 native saplings are due to be planted early next year, with help from GoodGym volunteers. For information and to donate, see the Cator Park Tiny Forest crowdfunder. Enthusiasm for the project is so high locally, there is even a Tiny Forest beer brewed in Penge by Southey especially to help meet the fundraising target!