On a cool, but thankfully dry, July morning, five GoodGym-ers volunteered at the Beats, Boards and BBQ festival. This ​is a great community event held annually in Charlton Park, with loads of activities including a skatejam competition, Afrofusion market, rap workshops, bouncy castles, T-shirt decorating, live graffiti mural and even a spot of dog skateboarding!

We joined the friendly team of volunteers to help them out with a range of set-up tasks. We started by putting up three gazebos of various shapes and sizes, then built a fence around the dog agility area, and finally we arranged the deckchairs around the site. Great effort everyone!

Not the usual litter picking task this week as 5 GoodGymers were asked to help out with the Beats, Boards & BBQ setup. This is a small festival in Charlton park with a skatejam, dog skateboarding competitions, music and a BBQ.

Firstly, we were set to work putting out the deckchairs dotted around the park and cafe area. This tasks was harder than it looked as it took a few go to set the chairs up correctly! We also hoped they stayed up for the entire event as the weather turned a bit blustery!

Our second job, was as a team to erect the main gazebo. We were all enlisted with holding a pole each as guy ropes were hammered hard into the ground to ensure it didn't blow away. Due to the gale like weather conditions we made sure we had extra tent pegs and they were firmly bashed in the with a very hard mallet.

After making sure everything we firmly in place and looked set not to blow away, we took a few pictures and headed off to the cafe for a well earned cup of coffee! All in all we enjoyed the change to the usual litter pick schedule! Maybe do the same again next year. 💖

A great afternoon helping our Friends of Charlton park put on their annual parkfest event. We covered marshalling, some litter picking and generally helping ensure a smooth running event. A big thanks to Julian & John for signing up.

There is the common saying that one man’s trash is another man’s treasure. And we’ve all heard of the person who gave Aunt Betty’s stamp collection to the jumble sale only to later find it contained the inverted Jenny (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_Jenny) or who came across a first edition of Harry Potter and the Philosophers Stone in the local Oxfam.

It would take a tremendous optimist to find value in what Good Gym clears out of Charlton Park but undeterred 5 treasure hunters descended on Saturday morning to clean the park. The park is popular on summer’s evenings and your author had expected to find a lot of mess to clean up but it was pleasing that after an hour or so we maybe had one black bags full of rubbish. The pick complete and having failed to discover a discarded copy of Action Comics No.1 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Action_Comics_1) we made our merry way off.

After supping up the last dregs of our post parkrun coffee's 3 GoodGymers set off on their monthly litter pick around Charlton Park. Lynn and Sarah as a team of two see off in a clockwise direction around the park, whereas Linda, as a team of one, went off in an anti-clockwise direction.

Well, with summer well on it's way, and the nights getting lighter it means more people in the park drinking, eating and generally hanging around. Unfortunately, this means more litter is dropped such as empty beer cans and discarded fast-food containers.

Maybe the park could do with a few more bins especially at the back-end of the park towards Cemetery lane. That always seem to be the worse corner for rubbish!

After a good hour of litter picking we headed back to the coffee shop and dropped off our black bags full of rubbish. A quick pit stop for a photo and we set off on our walk home. Good job done all round! 👍☺️

3 Good Gymers assembled on Saturday for the monthly Charlton park litter pick. The park is a lovely local facility and home to many activities including a park run. Unfortunately the park can, like so many other parks, be plagued by litter but Good Gym were there to fix that. We set off round the main areas of the park and were soon filling the bag and 45 minutes later we were done. Was nice to see at the this point that we'd only filled three quarters of a bag of litter so let's hope this reduction continues.