We descended on Cator Park from all directions this evening for a very prickly task!

A couple of patches of the hedge surrounding the park were looking a bit sad so the lovely Friends of the park had acquired some holly trees to fit in the gaps! Millie explained our jobs for the evening:

🕳 Digging holes

💧 Collecting water from the stream and half filling the holes

🌱 Planting the holly tree

🍂 Filling the hole back in, adding mulch and pressing down the soil with our heels to remove any air

We split into different groups to tackle the different tasks. Cat and Linda headed to collect some mulch, Alex was scooping water out the stream whilst Hannah, Clare and Sophia got started on the digging.

We nailed our timing, getting the trees in the ground in 40 minutes flat. We also found a stag beetle larvae - gross. Nice work, team!

Eleven massive legends met for an evenings jog and a good deed last night. For the first time this year it was actually light outside - what a treat!

Our task was for Crystal Palace Museum. We’ve been working our way around a derelict water tower base which has some amazing history and heck of a lot of soil, twigs and rubble to sort through. The plan is for it to one day become an accessible part of the museum where people can find out about the old Crystal Palace!

First up however, we met at the Bridge House. We were joined by Steve who works for Community Links Bromley. They recently arranged for some funding to get older people visits as GoodGym missions in our borough - cool! Steve's a keen runner, so it was great to have him along.

After a warm up in the park, we split into three groups, walking, a light jog and a longer jog. Hannah managed to get some snaps of us in action and we all arrived at the museum at almost the same time...

Statue Beat-you

My team arrived first and we were greeted by a load of old, mostly deformed statues so naturally we got a quick pic.

When everyone arrived, we grabbed a load of tools and headed inside. It was the same job as usual but with so many of us, we managed to cover the whole space. We dug down to the concrete floor, Cat chopped up a sizeable root, we used a trolley sieve to sift the debris from the soil and then bagged it up to take outside. The space was looking noticeably clearer when we left. 💪

On our way back we had a game of squat, paper, scissors which it turns out Alex is an expert in. Now he has thighs of steel.

Top work everyone!

Last night we had an outstanding octet of GoodGymmers running up and down a big hill (twice) and bagging a good deed in the process.

We met at the Bridge House, shared our dream living location (because the weather lately has been pretty dreary) and then we made our way up CP Park Road before descending to our task.

Lots of drama in this weeks task...

We met Jack (and Hannah and Alex) at the pretty damn impressive Kingswood House, a Manor House located in the middle of a housing estate. Mad. Jack gave us the lowdown on how he’d pitched a project turning the unused space into a community arts hub. It’s gonna be really cool.

Caught in the act.

His task for us involved moving a whole lot of furniture. There was a big room full of it, some which needed moving to other parts of the building and the rest which needed to be rearranged to sit more snugly in the room.

🪑 First up we piled up and moved the chairs to one side of the room. Clare exclusively moved the wheely chairs.

🔩 Then we shifted some dismantled shelves downstairs as well as some big metal tables.

🪖 Hannah and Alex found an old knights helmet. This was not part of the brief but it looked nice (see pics) despite smelling awful apparently.

Chain mail...

🔗 We finished off moving all the shelving and tables into the basement via a well coordinated human chain. The conveyor belt system worked a dream and we sent all the gear downstairs, with time to visit a super creepy room where a dog had clearly been scratching at the door :(

We bid Jack farewell and headed home with some more excellent jogging up and over the hill.

Amazing stuff everyone! ✌️