Another exquisite pun courtesy of Hannah ✌️😜

Another post-covid attendance record smashed.

And another session making some serious progress at the Water Tower. 🔥🔥🔥💦💦💦🚒🚒🚒

Shout out to Molly, Dani and Emma for attending their first GG sesh. So nice to have you join us.

We kicked off in the Bridge House with names and board games - some classics and some clearly quite complex choices. And then we did a brisk warm up before splitting in 3.

Cat and the speeders sped out and round the park. Hannah and Angela formed the walking contingent and the rest of us took the winding route through the park.

We arrived almost in sync, met history genius John, and headed into the tower. As usual, our tasks were varied:

🌱 Pulling out many wee weeds

🛒 Shovelling in and shaking soil through the trolley

💰 Bagging up the good stuff (which we'll use for our GoodGym garden in Betts Park) 😉

📷 I was trying to take some nice profile pics for people. I'm no photographer though, so they suck, sorry.

After 30 minutes, we called it a day, having made another massive dent in the project, which will one day mean that the public can access the tower during their museum experience. We posed for some peace-ing and then hit the road, back to the pub for some stretching and beverages.

Massive props to everyone 👏👏👏👏

If I had a favourite number, it would be 13, which is the number of fantastic GoodGymers we had at our session last night.

We kicked off in the Bridge House, named ourselves and shared favourite beverages for a warm day and promptly hit the road. Our task(s) were at the lovely Betts Park,

🎨 Bringing back some life to a few old raised beds

🌱 Weeding between the cracks in the play area and

✂️ Trimming back a few overgrown branches.

We met Alan from the Friends of Betts Park who gave us a quick history lesson on the Croydon Canal (the last stretch of canal in south London 🥲) and grabbed all our necessary tools.

Team DIY (aka Sandra and Millie) screwed a couple of dislodged planks back onto one of the raised beds. Team Paint (aka Hannah, Fiona, Shauna, Meg, Angela and Egle) were turning the beds a deep shade of green, Team Trim (aka me and Harry) cut back a few branches overhanging the paths before helping out Team Weed (aka Cat, Catherine and Alex) with eeking out a load of grass and weeds that had been growing between the tarmac in the play area. And somewhere in there, we managed to cart over a load of soil (fresh from Crystal Palace Museum's water tower!) and empty it into the beds.

The play area looks so much neater now ("Are you guys making the park look nicer? Do you get paid for that?", said the teenager), the paths are a bit safer, and the raised beds are finally ready to have some herbs and veg growing in them again!

Amazing work team. And a few km and plenty of leg exercises to boot. 👌

This evening, 8 beautiful souls (I guess) met for an evening's jog and a good deed too! 6 of us met at The Bridge House. 4 of those ran whilst the others walked and then we met 2 at the museum!

We've been at it for a little while now, but the museum is finally opening the door for the public to view Brunel's old water tower base. The top was knocked down in the war (on purpose - so the baddie planes couldn't tell where they were) and since then the plants in there have run wild.

Our task for the evening was to clear the entrance as it's a bit precarious anyway...

🌱 We pulled out weeds and scraped moss off the bricks

🪵 Sami was yanking dead branches down

🧱 We cleared rubble out the way

🧺 And took it all out of the tower to leave a clear pathway.

Afterwards, we took a quick snap (coming soon...), played a game of Rock, Paper, Scissors, did some press-ups and tricep dips and even managed some sprints to finish. 😅

Solid effort everyone - see you next time!

This evening we had another trip to Crystal Palace Museum and Brunel's old Water Tower base. It's a pretty rad piece of structural engineering which we've been gradually excavating so it can become accessible to the public.

Rosie, Catherine and I met at the Bridge House for a lovely run through the park to meet Nick, Ian and (brand new to GG...) Meg! We also met John who'd already prepared tools ready for our archeological dig...

Catherine and Ian set to work with trowels carefully removing soil around some clay piping, Nick got to work sieving through some soil to get the twigs out and Meg and Rosie were digging out around some big tree stumps.

It was nice to have a bit of light for our evening session and we managed to get through another significant chunk of the work.

On the way back to base we did some tricep dips, press-ups and squats at Stone Penge.

Shout-out to Raleigh for the chocolate and discount codes! 🍫👅

Great stuff team! 😊