A small but mighty team from GoodGym Crystal Palace headed over to Alexandra Rec tonight to help out Millie from the Friends of Cator Park and Alexandra Rec.

Our mission? To help prepare the railings around the playground for a fresh coat of paint by removing the old, flaky layers that had seen better days. Armed with wire brushes, safety goggles and plenty of elbow grease, we made decent progress and got a good arm workout in the process. Check out Mark's cool video of the task here!

Thanks to everyone who came out!

Bad jokes happen when you have a little bit of a sore throat in a vegetable garden, and you have really missed going out on a Goodgym community task!

We also had the privilege last night of having two James' and a Jami on the task, as well as me and Mark.

Arriving at the task after a chat about data and reporting (sorry James) we set about tidying the place up a bit. A lot of weeding, chatting about which weeds are actually good, or at least impressive in looks or resilience (hello bindweed). A lot of sweeping, jumping in weed/compost piles (Mark), and litterpicking.

All resulting in a much-improved space at the centre of the estate, and more of a clean slate for the summer. And soon we'll be back to do the fence painting when the weather's a bit better.

Well done team!

We kicked off the evening naming ourselves and expressing which form of art we would give a go if we could, from improv comedy to lino printing to songwriting. After a nice jog through Crystal Palace, admiring the newly regenerated Italian Terraces, we arrived back at the Paxton Centre for our second annual table tightening championships.

The Paxton Centre is an arts cafe/workshop space with a built in gallery. It's cool. They're also a non-profit. Super cool.

We upturned the tables, unscrewed the legs, tightened them up on the inside, rescrewed them on, and levelled them out with the bits at the bottom. I'm not sure who won the championship. Everyone I guess.

After that we took a photo on the stairs as if we're Blazin' Squad and set off on our merry way.

Nice one, team. 🔥🔥🔥🔥

Five GoodGymmers ran from Penge to Beckenham Place Park last night where we met with James and Tilly from the BPP Ranger team over at the newly-landscaped East Gate area. This was our longest group run in a while and, after some initially confused weather (sunshine and hail?!), we were treated to a beautiful rainbow as we made our way up to Beckenham Hill.

Once we arrived, our task was to move woodchip onto the new flowerbeds to help to suppress pesky weeds. After 40 mins of shovelling, we made our way back through the park and enjoyed the last of the evening sunshine.

Well done team!

As is customary in the south eastern pocket of London known as Crystal Palace, the first GoodGym session of the year was a Christmas Tree Scavenger Hunt - clearing the streets, reducing waste going to landfill/incineration and saving others a job.

Our team of 5 were in high spirits to start with until no trees appeared...

Fortunately, a good 45 minutes after starting our mission, one tree presented itself to us!

And then minutes later, nestled inside someone's garden... another! We nicked it anyway and shifted them up the road to the tree-cycling spot in/surrounding Mayow Park where they will be churned up into woodchip. Nice.

Top work gang. See you next year?