Another great evening with GoodGym at Grow Baby, supporting families in need.

Led by Rachel, our team — Jana, Manasa, Jonathan, Luke and Saber — got straight to work forming a human chain, quickly moving bags upstairs and building an impressive pile by the door (with Luke keeping spirits high with marathon stories along the way!).

With that done in record time, we moved downstairs where tasks were expertly assigned:

• Shoes sorted by Manasa

• Coats and dresses organised by Jonathan

• Toys checked by Luke

• Essentials stocked by Jana

• Saber helping wherever needed

We then tackled sorting winter clothes, blankets and grow bags into storage, making great progress in just an hour. With time for one final push, the teddy bear box turned into a fun finale — with Luke and Jonathan in goal as Jana launched toys over a wall of bags!

We finished with a group selfie among the piles — tired, happy, and having achieved loads in a short time. A brilliant effort all round 👏

Over at Refugee action having run, cycled and walked over we split in to teams to sort donations.

Men’s and women’s clothing as well as new donations required sorting and categorising whilst shoes needed pairing up. As always there were a few rouge items in the wrong section that needed rehoming and a few rainbow and sparkly numbers discovered for photos.

An hour after starting John and Tom had created an incredibly neat menswear department, Emma, Anna and Ellie had got women’s wear in order, Marcus had ensured that every shoe had a partner and Adam and Claire had filtered and put away all the donations.

After few snacks (we couldn’t resist) and a group photo we said our goodbyes with the runners heading off for a lovely run along the river.

Best-laid plans often go awry... and tonight was one of these times. Our resilient leader Rachel had organised two tasks for the evening (as our little group is not so little anymore!) but alas one fell through at the last minute so all 13 of us ended up together at Claremont Gardens in Surbiton. Fortunately the task here was big enough to take us all and then some.

We all congregated by the dried up pond in Claremont Gardens and task owner Georgina explained that the pond needed to be stripped back of rubbish, sticks, logs and dead/unnecessary reeds so that it could be filled up again. The liner had unfortunately failed which meant, even after all the rain fall of 2026 so far, the pond was mostly dry.

Many hands really were needed for this task as there was a whole load to do. Sticks and logs were collected from the pond bed and turned into a bug hotel up on the bank; reeds were pulled up from the driest parts; Dead vegetation was removed; huge clumps of reed roots were extracted and swathes of grass were dug up, roots and all. We found a few of our amphibious friends along the way and made sure that they hopped off to a safe spot.

The hour flew by and we made great progress. The next step is to fill the pond and hope that our work means that the water holds this time! There's plenty more work to do in and around the pond so hopefully we'll be back to check it out again sometime soon.

Kingston GoodGym has a long history with the communal garden at Vine Close, which we helped clear ahead of its redesign from the very beginning. It's so satisfying to see how far it has come to the relacing setting and the beautiful pond teeming with wildlife it is today.

Georgina, the biodiversity officer from Kingston, was on hand to get us started and help with nature advice.

Jonathan, Laurel and Marcos got stuck into removing invasive plants around the banks and even made a tiny new frog friend.

Claire, Emma and Adam helped tidy up the surrounding garden and plant pots while Tom and Laura somehow managed to avoid wet feet clearing duckweed from the pond.

Everything looked great afterwards, and we could even see a few newts in the - temporarily - clear pond. A lovely task on a perfect spring evening.

This evening we were back at Elm Road playground for the second time, finishing off the work we started last week.

One of the walled edges of the park has around 10 panels that at one point in time were all covered in beautiful mosaics. Unfortunately most have now deteriorated so only 3 complete panels remain. The task was to scrape clean and sand down the panels (with no mosaics) to enable a local artist to paint it with a much more attractive mural.

Tonight's GoodGymers walked, cycled or ran to the task and soon got stuck in, most of us knowing what to do after last week. It was a messy job but great to make some more progress and we're all looking forward to seeing the final result after the artist has completed their work!m

We were very honoured that the Mayor came to pay us a visit and he got stuck in, once he had removed his chains, and helped to scrape and sand like the rest of us.

We also welcomed Nikita on her first task - thank you for joining us! Hope to see you at another task soon.