This week, a hard-as-nails GoodGym contingent made their way to the Brighton Community Workshop in Kemptown, billed on its website as a "collective garden shed", a kind of tool nirvana bursting at the seams with everything from nut drivers to ratchets. An organisational task was on the table, for the team to bring order to chaos, to metaphorically extract the spanners from the works.

The team were welcomed by Pete Ranson, director of the workshop (and also recognised by some as director of the East Brighton parkrun), who quickly mapped out the evening's assignments. One group was to rationalise onto various shelves different lengths of wood so that visitors to the workshop could easily be offered the sweet spot size they would need for their respective DIY projects. The other group were focused on categorising into tupperware containers a impressive variety of screws, nuts and other tighteners/ fasteners, as well as many other miscellaneous items, including alum keys, picture hooks, and a 22cm ruler.

Going at it hammer and tongs, the GoodGym gang soon recognised that the task required mental acuity as well as physical agility, but as usual rose to the challenge and the workshop was duly transformed. There remained plenty of potential for a sequel visit however with much still to sort, and Pete offered some a quick tour down to the cellar, revealing further boxes and vertiginous piles of items to be catalogued.

The Brighton Community Workshop & Tool Library opened in Kemptown in 2022, following a previous iteration as part of Revaluit in Old Steine, and offers a creative space for crafting and building, skills workshops (including regular arts and crafts sessions) plus an expansive tool library that functions like a book library. As the session wound to a close, and the team filtered out to clink glasses at a social at the Sidewinder, Pete outlined the workshop's aims to empower people with skills and to promote a circular economy of sharing, reusing, repairing and recycling. He added that in 2020 man-made mass began to exceed overall biomass in the world. Humans are making a lot of undue waste, he was saying, and that's a point that needs drilling home.

What a great organisation for first comers Ellie and Harry. Welcome to Goodgym Brighton!