A return visit to our favourite storage facility this evening for Hilary, Eugene, Adam, Fuad, Lise and Nick to do some more clothes sorting for the Care4Calais team, with clear instructions this week to sort out children’s clothing by specific ages so that the Care4Calais team could do a distribution during March.

Having learned a few lessons from our previous visit, including how to actually get into the facility and navigate the maze of storage to find the relevant lock up room, and to bring a couple of marker pens...we were able to get sorting pretty quickly this week, with empty boxes marked for the different age categories, and piles of donated items put into the corridors for the teams to go through and sort per the instructions from the team.

To the sound of a random playlist of 90’s/00’s tunes feeding through the facility’s speaker system, and our ongoing admiration for any clothing items made in Bangladesh to keep Fuad happy, plus the now familiar entertaining collection of somewhat unusual donated items (there was a whole dressing up box of items that we (mostly) resisted delving into), we soon had a “production line” going and filled 6 boxes, each marked with a different age category, by the end of the evening. There is still much to do, so another visit surely beckons before too long.

Seven GoodGymmers set out today to wage war on one of the less glamorous foes of East London: rubbish. And wow… there was a lot of it.

The Journey

A few of us kicked things off with a run from the London Aquatics Centre, warming up nicely before the main event. The air at the Aquatics Centre: fresh. The air under the bridge between Drapers Fields and Chobham Manor School: not so much.

The Task

The area around the bridge turned out to be extremely heavily littered — the kind of spot where you look around and instantly know:

“Yes, this is why GoodGym exists.”

Broken glass? tick

Mystery smells? tick

Random items that really shouldn’t be outdoors? tick

Enough rubbish to fill the Olympic pool? Maybe not, but we did manage to fill around 20 bags, which isn’t bad for a Saturday mission.

The Team

All seven of us got stuck in, spreading out across the site like a well‑coordinated litter‑picking strike force. The teamwork was top tier — grabbers grabbing, bags filling, jokes flying.

The Impact

By the end, the path looked cleaner, safer, and significantly less like a post‑festival campsite. It was one of those tasks where the difference was instantly noticeable — exactly the kind of satisfying GoodGym magic that reminds you why we do this.