On Wednesday evening, George, Paul and Victoria headed to the Phoenix Cinema to join local community members for a screening of the People’s Emergency Briefing, an event that GoodGym Barnet helped bring to life.

The People’s Emergency Briefing is designed to be shown at community screenings, encouraging conversations between local residents and highlighting how much people within these communities care about the climate emergency. This screening sold out, bringing a full house together for the climate conversation.

Several Barnet-based community groups, including Barnet Friends of the Earth, Finchley CND, Chipping Barnet Foodbank, Barnet U3A and many more, attended the screening and took part in discussions afterwards, sharing their reactions to the film, their concerns about the climate emergency, and ideas for addressing the challenges ahead.

Afterwards, much of the group headed to The Bald Faced Stag for drinks, further conversation, and a bit of community building. George and Victoria even shared their thoughts to help Dave McCormick - who compered the event with Silvana Kohon - write a report on the event for The Archer.

George kicked off the run with a question about gigs, inspiring Rachel and Beattie, two stalwart GoodGymers, to give this report a slightly musical theme.

Beattie took a walk on the wild side with Patricia, while the others set off running, with Victoria as back marker. Richard went past like a flash—ah-ah!—and George once again wondered whether Richard had ambitions for leadership.

All the leaves were brown and the sky had a greyish tinge as the GoodGymers set to work for a while on an autumn day.

We raked the leaves with abandon and bagged them up, then tucked the bulbs into the soil, leaving them “dreaming Spring”. We pictured a host of golden daffodils to come, taking a moment to look up at the stars.

We made these memories for ourselves, with Theodore capturing our usual photos.

Finally, we laid down our tools and returned to the cinema, where we celebrated Richard’s 400th outing with pizza and popcorn.

GoodGym Barnet – Barnet Climate Action Week tiny forest Barnet

A beautiful day to get together at Mutton Brook as part of Barnet Climate Action Week, combining a little practical work, citizen science and a chance to introduce more people to our local Tiny Forests.

Starting at 11am, Richard and Subhamboth local residents, were already on site and quickly got stuck into some litter picking after a chat about the four Tiny Forests.

The original Tiny Forest is now well established, but the three newer forests have endured a brutal summer and are showing signs of stress, with some struggling trees and plenty of weeds.

These three forests are particularly interesting because each has a different soil preparation method. Looking up the slope, the middle plot uses biochar, the right-hand plot follows the standard Miyawaki method, and the left-hand plot uses a simpler, no-dig approach incorporating cardboard. On general inspection, the middle biochar forest appears to be showing the strongest growth, although proper measurements will tell us more. Victoria said Yes lots of fun. Like high school science class again haha!

’innovative approach to growing trees with the help of biochar was recently featured on BBC Countryfile at Blenheim Palace on 1 February 2026. You can find out more on BBC iPlayer.https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m002qwy0

Roman & Victoria were both new to the Tiny Forest project and got stuck into our citizen science work, identifying trees, recording their positions along a transect and measuring their diameters. This helps us monitor growth and understand their potential for carbon capture. We’ll share the data with Earthwatch and hopefully continue these measurements over the coming months.

It was also a lovely opportunity to chat about our local community and the wider work GoodGym gets involved with, supporting green spaces, community groups and projects that encourage people to get outdoors and take practical action.

And, as has become something of a GoodGym tradition, we rounded things off with a little frisbee throwing and a runaround for anyone who fancied it!

A big thank you to everyone who came along. A lovely mix of practical volunteering, learning something new and enjoying our local green spaces together. That’s what GoodGym is all about!

Seven sturdy Goodgymmers gathered at the Phoenix for our group re-run to Shepherds Hill Gardens. It's a good long one, and to make it inclusive, we set up a walking group as well, with Patricia and Paul setting off early.

Yet we also gathered to celebrate yet another amazing milestone: Richard's 400th mission! Well, technically 402nd, as he'd been busy over the weekend helping at Ally Pally Park Run, but still, out came the hat, and we had our little ceremonial congratulations for the evening.

Subham joined us just in time for the warm up, and tonight's icebreaker was about pets, dissections and weird animals. Rachel shared a story about feeding crickets on the loose, and I recalled a fond memory of my tortoise, also called George. And, courtesy of Victoria, we learned schools in the US do a lot of weird dissection.

Then it was off for the long 2.7km run to Shepherds Hill, where Pat had already broken out the brooms and rake. There was a pile of dumped cement in one corner, which Subham gamely resolved, while Patricia tackled the grass areas, raking everything up. Everyone else was on path duties, catching all the early autumn leaves and carrying them in bags down to the leaf pile in the wood.

And before we knew it, it was time for our little tea break - some lovely fresh mint, guava juice and biscuits - so many biscuits, including a special vegan treat for me! We ate enough to earn the run back to the Phoenix, arriving about 20:30 for a warm down and a pat on our proverbial backs for treating ourselves to a night of fitness and helping the Friends of Shepherds Hill shepherd the hill.