Ealing was lucky this weekend to enjoy the blue sky and soak under the shy sunshine of early Spring. After a busy Saturday, Sunday brought our GoodGymers another outdoor task, so great weather was appreciated by everyone. Continuing yesterday's trend, we had another visitor from GoodGym Hounslow: Kymm. Ealing was represented by the usual suspects: Sevan, Steph Ducat and Kash.

John and Heather from GPRA welcomed us with tea and led us to the area at the back, which - even after our last task in December - still looked more like a bike graveyard than a garden. John wanted to challenge the status quo and proposed a plan of action to further clear the space off bikes. The spare wheels were to be slotted in between the old fence and the sturdy fence erected by the council. The interesting fact about the fence predating the council one was that the holes in it were taking almost as much space as the remaining wire!

While Steph and Sevan were assembling bike wheels into an art installation, Kymm spotted something blinking under the leaves on the paving.

- Is this a firefly?
- Do we have fireflies in London?
- I don't know!

The flashing object turned out to be a bike light - not as much a surprise as a firefly would have been!

The bikes occupying the space were not the only things the garden would have been better without. The GoodGymers scooped the copious amounts of leaves, creatively using a bin cover as a dustpan. When the green wheelie bin was full to the brim, the teammates took turns to jump or dance on the top to compress the contents*.

Despite all the efforts put into the wild hopping, the wheelie bin was not bottomless, so Heather went to fetch her green bin along with the cutting tools for GoodGymers to deal with the spiky branches found between the bikes. New equipment inspired our team to cut down the ivy, which in counter-offense threw some pollen into our eyes!

We finished when Heather's wheelie bin was full and all the bikes were stacked on one side. The next step might be disassembling one of the bike racks or maybe painting the garden benches. Watch this space for another session at the GPRA Hall!

* No wheelie bins were injured during this GoodGym session

The very first community mission of December promised Ealing GoodGymers a shower of activities full of Christmas spirit. Everyone was looking forward to festive tasks such as giving the GPRA Hall a fresh layer of paint and upcycling old bikes into decorative reindeer. In practice, the season brought us a different kind of shower, and we started the session by hiding from the rain in the community centre.

John welcomed us with tea and coffee and proposed an alternative task, supporting the neighbouring London Bike Hub, a not-for-profit workshop with a vision of embedding cycling into the community, a place where people can donate old bicycles, buy a refurbished bike, learn maintenance skills and attend classes on how to ride safely. Together with John and Winston from the Bike Hub, our GoodGymers were about to declutter the space behind the GPRA Hall and help transport the donated bikes to store safely in John's backyard.

Mohamed, Sevan, Kash and two GoodGymers who had joined us before at Pear Tree Park (including a new joiner, Maria) formed a human chain in a narrow space next to the hall - luckily, covered from the rain! We started moving the cycles from the backyard to the space in the front of the community centre: from surprisingly heavy kiddies rides, through ultra-light road bicycles, to large Dutch bikes.

When the shower turned into a lighter drizzle, it was time to transport the bikes up the road towards John's place to store them. The larger cycles that didn't have flat tyres (but still had wheels!) could be wheeled along the road. Mohamed even gave a try riding one of them, pulling the second one by his side. One of the GoodGymers stayed by the hall and played Tetris, putting the bicycles on a trailer for Winston to haul uphill. We did as much as we could to quickly clear the space in front of the community centre as guests who rented the hall for their events started arriving.

We didn't get to build any steampunk-looking reindeer today, but the results of the clear-out were very satisfying. When it was time to leave, some bikes were still in the GPRA Hall's front garden. Winston was confident he would sort them out, and John thought that if some kid's bicycles disappeared, the new owner would do them a favour as too many children's bikes were donated to store and distribute them.

We are already looking forward to visiting the GPRA and London Bike Hub in the New Year!

The history of today's task dates back to the 1st of September this year when Kash and Sevan met John from Greenford Park Residents Association at Brentford Festival. John introduced them to his organisation and mentioned their hall that could use a facelift.

On a Sunday morning, a decent-sized group of GoodGymers: Kash, Lauren, Louis, Sevan and Steph, met the GPRA team: Emma, John and Winston at the community hall. Emma told us about the history of the association, which was founded in 1919 and later acquired the space to build the hall in the 1950s. The place was also home to the London Bike Hub and concealed numerous bicycles in either one or multiple pieces.

The GPRA building looked quite unassuming, hidden away from the main road and obscured by an overgrown hedge. According to John, many residents didn't even realise the hall's existence. It was time to change that and make the centre stand out! Forget spring clean-up - GoodGym does the clean-ups all year round!

The 90-minute task included feats of strength, skill and persistence:

• rehoming a large filing cabinet
• smuggling garden waste up the road in a recycling bin
• scavenging old wood to collect material for a bonfire
• a radical haircut given to a hedge to reveal the entrance to the hall
• a serious tidy-up of a rainwater drainage system
• carrying heavy iron fence parts uphill by a team of three
• carrying heavy iron fence parts uphill by a team of one - guess who!

By the end of the session, the GoodGymers made a visible impact - a bit more than just being in the way of today's guests to the morning event at the hall! The front of the GPRA Hall looked much tidier than before, and numerous heavy items no longer needed inside the centre disappeared. John alluded to the future sessions for GPRA closer to Christmas time to make the hall entrance more extravagant - watch this space!