When it comes to a job shifting fly tipping on the Rawthorpe Estate the GoodGym crew are tenacious. They have a tendency not to rest rest until every sofa has been shifted, coffee table collected and all other rubbish removed. I’m not so sure that the tenants of the estate are always so grateful, but Sharon Donaghy the local housing officer is always pleased when GoodGym come to help tidy her patch.

As is often the case Sharon had been preparing for our visit by scouting around the estate and making lists of the locations of the discarded items for us to collect. The GoodGymmers listened attentively as she explained the tasks and distributed her handwritten lists to the three teams of three GoodGymmers each, who were eager and ready to be off hunting for tipping.

And it wasn’t difficult to find, the more we looked the more we tended to find. We were soon accumulating all manner of household items, chairs, tables, sofas, and TV’s from around the estate. All the items carefully were stacked in piles for the Kirklees Neighbourhood Housing Housing caretakers to collect with their truck the following day. The biggest challenge of the night came in the form of a huge fridge freezer which required a lot of attention (and effort) from four GoodGymmers to carry the length of Netherhall Avenue.

All our previous clear-up jobs on the estate have been done in the winter under cover of darkness, so it was quite novel to do one in the light. This of course brought with it a little bit of audience participation from the local kids and teenagers who were hanging around. Their comments, far from being tense were (on the whole) quite good natured and encouraging.

After quite a bit of hard labour and some intense effort, with muscles possibly a little tender we were done. All the tipped items from the Sharon’s lists had been safely shifted and the estate was ten times tidier than it had been an hour previously. Following the obligatory photo of the group with our massive pile of rubbish we said farewell to Sharon and headed back down Kilner Bank for the short run home to the Stadium.

Oh....just in case you hadn’t realised we had a total of TEN GoodGymmers for last night’s task. This is the first time we have reached double figures since the launch run last September. Thanks to Kati Law, Louise Galvin, Ben Godfrey, Heather Wilshaw Jones, Meg Deacon, Katrina Crossley, Peter Phillips and Victoria Knight Phillips for a truly record breaking fly tip shifting effort. There was nothing tentative about your commitment tonight, as ever you all got stuck in and tackled another tough job. Definitely ten out of ten for effort guys!