Painting The Town Red

7 Goodgymers helped their local community in Richmond
Lucy Hill
Adam Stephens
Sam
1 / 10
Richmond

Monday 19th October

Credits
Lucy Hill
Lucy Hill

PHOTOGRAPHER

REPORT WRITER

Richmond runner

WALK LEADER

PHOTOGRAPHER

Adam Stephens
Adam Stephens

SESSION ORGANISER

Richmond runner

WALK LEADER

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Report written by Lucy Hill

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We were off to Twickenham on Monday night to meet Emma from Box Walks. Box Walks for those not in the know are a Richmond based charity that takes the now iconic but now unused red phone boxes and turns them into interactive nature walks. Back in the summer, we had taken a tour of the Richmond boxes, and now it was time to take on Twickenham.

Our job for the evening was to give each box a clean and keep them in ‘box fresh’ condition. A quiet Monday night in Twickenham might not be the usual idea of ‘painting the town red’, but armed with cleaning spray and wipes, dusters and brooms, and tins of iconic post box red paint, we got to it. We started with ‘Cara The Climate Change Box’ before heading down the Green to ‘Ralph The Resource Circularity Box’.
Some of the boxes needed a bit more TLC, with graffiti, stickers and other unorthodox anti-social behaviour needing some clean up too. If we weren’t going red, we were influenced by The Rolling Stones, and were painting it black. Fun fact, the Stones have a well connected history with Twickenham having had residency on Eel Pie Island, and playing sell out shows at the stadium!

Once we’d completed the two boxes on the green, and completed the quizzes for each box (did you know that less than 10% of our rubbish is actually recycled?!), we made our way along Heath Road to the Church Street box, ‘Polly The Pollinator Box’, before getting her all sparkling spick and span.

A successful evening of doing good, getting fit and educating ourselves. Thanks to Adam for leading the runners, and welcome back Louise who was visising for the evening from deepest darkest East London!


This task supported
Box Walks
Restoration of our iconic, red phone boxes with a twist

We restore Richmond's iconic, red phone boxes and use them as destination points on nature-based walks. Each phone box is given a name and a theme. By visiting the phone box you can unlock interactive content which helps you reduce your environmental footprint on your doorstep. We would like to invite our Good Gym runners to use our routes for your runs and to help us keep our phone boxes in good conditions by giving them a good wipe down when you reach each one. We have been able to show that if the phone boxes are kept looking tidy, this reduces vandalism exponentially. Box Walks is a charity organisation which wants to bring our pone boxes out of retirement to do some good for our communities. We would love your help maintaining our phone boxes. You can see our routes and phone boxes on our website: https://boxwalks.com/

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Richmond

GG Richmond x Let's Lift the Curfew: Relaying this lovely little community spot
🗓Monday 26th October 6:45pm

Creating a cared for space for local residents

Sam
Ken MacKenzie
Adam Stephens
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