This afternoon, Sarah and I ventured south of the river to conduct visitor surveys at the Great Get Together Bankside. The street party was being hosted by the Bankside Open Spaces Trust (BOST) joining the Jo Cox Foundation’s nationwide celebration of inclusion, tolerance and social cohesion.

Having been briefed on our mission, armed with surveys and pens, and adorned with stickers and sashes, we set off in a bid to get as many surveys completed as possible. As both of us are always keen to spend time with cute animals, we naturally gravitated towards the animal zone where we found plenty of people more than willing to fill in our surveys whilst we got to pet some of our new friends. Despite Sarah’s best Dr Dolittle impressions, sadly we were unable to get any feedback from any of the animals, so we settled on a few photos instead.

After an enjoyable hour and a half of mingling and soaking up the atmosphere, and with over 60 completed surveys, it was time to head off. We said our farewells to the people of BOST, who very kindly offered us sandwiches and juice for our efforts, and made our way back across the river for our next community mission of the day.

Great working with you Sarah, and thanks for an entertaining and enjoyable afternoon BOST.

This evening, nine GoodGymmers met to help Bankside Open Spaces Trust set up a massive street party on Bankside for their Great Get Together event tomorrow. They'll have food stalls, live entertainment, zorbing, and some whacky races, all located just a few minutes south from London Bridge. With so much to do, that meant that there was plenty for GoodGym to get involved with! 😄

Our contact, Sarah, gave us and the other volunteers a quick briefing on site and handed us all a list of things that needed to be done. It was pretty long (6 full pages of size 12 font), but luckily our part was restricted to a very small part of it.

Our main task seemed to be to cable tie a load of things to other things: We tied banners to barriers, "Zone" signs to posts (and/or trees - we weren't discriminant), and flag poles to fences (this was the best job, if only for the Boomerangs you could make for Instagram).

We then seemed to accrue random side jobs to do in small groups. A couple of us went on a hunt for a type of mythical trolley (there were apparently several in nearby storage, but the code we had didn't work). Some others of us pushed scaffolding along a street so that other volunteers could climb from it to hang bunting. The least exciting side job was probably putting out the bins, despite the attempts of the black bags to enliven it by refusing (😉) to go into them without splitting.

After a couple of hours or so of this type of piecemeal tasking, we started to make our goodbyes, with a group of seven deciding to go to a nearby pub for refreshments afterwards.

Great Get Together Bankside looks like it's going to be a really fun event tomorrow (Sunday 23rd June), so do swing by if you're in the area. If you'd like to see more information about their event, please look here 😄👍