The Adventure Playground is finally able to reopen after all the Covid lockdowns and huge rebuild after last year’s arson attack!

It’s looking amazing and we were tidying up the last of the building tools and moving the old, incredibly heavy, fencing so it can be recycled into something fun somewhere else.

We’ll be back to support this fantastic place and people soon 🤩

A brilliant evening was shared by 11 (yes, double figures!) GoodGymmers at the wonderful St Paul’s Adventure Playground who are getting ready to reopen in January having been shut for 9 months due to Covid and the arson attack. Welcome Emma - the first of many GoodGym tasks, we hope!

A HUGE pile of woodchip was shifted to the new play area to creat soft-ish landings for inevitable tumbles, we’re awaiting the play equipment sign-off before we fully test the landings...

Jerk chicken from the barbecue finished off the evening and the site was left secure with repositioned fences - back in January, folks!

We’d normally arrive with about 40 GoodGymmers so it felt odd with just 5 of us at the adventure playground.

We were greeted by a big pile of woodchip and a HUGE newly rebuilt adventure playground - the amazing result of the horrible arson attack earlier in the year.

We started the task of wood chipping under the new structure whilst catching up on all the latest news and plans. Artistic wheelbarrow emptying was the order of the day, with social distancing on the wheel of fortune.

Almost like normal.

We like to move it move it! However when "it" is a large number of very long very heavy wooden beams it takes Goodgym runner beam teamwork to get them from A to B. Tired by the end, we'll all be sleep(er) ing well tonight. So sad to see the devastation wrought by the fire, but great to hear the fundraising was successful and the playground is recovering. We said goodbye with beaming smiles, sure to be back again soon.

So much to do and so little time!

First, the moving of the poles. We had to come together, socially distanced, to move some telegraph poles out of the way. These things were heavy! A combination of moments (thanks Jenny), lifting and when all else failed kicking were required to move these behemoths.

Next there was the moving of the fencing to protect people from falling branches after the fire damage. This was made even more devilishly tricky by the last two pieces not quite meeting at the top! A jiggle along the fence sorted this out though.

Finally there was litter picking and sweeping of leaves to make the place look nicer.

All this in an hour! Well done everyone, you are awesome 😊

It was a chilly one for us tonight but it didn't stop the droves of GoodGymers once again coming out to do as much good as they could on this January eve. It was great to have Naomi and Ashleigh join us for the first time tonight - we hope to see you again soon!

We tried to master our brain and body warm-up again with different moves for each number... slightly better than last week, still a lot of brain warming up required. Once we were warm, we split into two groups. Alice was leading a smaller group to The Matthew Tree Project. We did our main session of helping them earlier in the month, but as they still have loads of donations to sort through following the generosity of people in the run up to Christmas, they asked if the group could come back for another session. Off down the cycle path they went, and they had a jolly half an hour of sorting as many tins as they could, much to Amy from TMTP's delight.

Abs-olutely amazing

The rest of the group headed to St Paul's Adventure Playground, where we met Guy, Rachel and 6-month old Rosa, who introduced us to the evening's tasks. There was leaf sweeping and litter-picking to be done, so the group were armed with brushes and litter-pickers and got to work making it clear for the local children again, getting an ab workout at the same time with their brooming. Another group were tasked with moving wood chip from one location to make a soft landing for the new rope swing. And a final group were screwdriver-ing between the planks on the play structure to remove leaves and make it stronger and last longer. It's no visit to a playground without a cheeky play, so we set off on a GoodGym chain down the steepest slide in the world (or maybe the steepest in St Paul's, Bristol...)

Once we were back in Queen Square, there was time for tonight's fitness session. Although some people may have played an alcohol-based game to Roxanne before, it was time for something much more fun. Once the group were sick of the name Roxanne and could burpee no more, we stretched off, before celebrating Julie's achievement of reaching 100 Good Deeds last week with the now-traditional Centurion Gallop. Well done Julie! We got to celebrate with some delicious flapjacks and brownies from Julie, then head on our way.