Tonight we were back at Brunel's old water tower, or what's left of it at least... There are grand plans to make it a part of the Crystal Palace museum story, but first it needs emptying out, which is where we come in! We've been removing weeds, soil, rubble and rubbish and are making steady progress.

First up, we met at the Bridge House (shout out to Jess for joining for the first time 🙌) and had a super windy route up through the park, trying to not get hit by the bike race...

At the tower, our tools were nicely prepped by David and we got straight to work, this time focusing on the entrance which had become overgrown. Clare, James and Fi were also building a fab structure of bricks (rather than a pile...) in order to access some of the plant roots.

By the end, team entrance and team brick had made a really big difference, in such a short space of time!

Nicely done everyone - a well deserved beverage at the pub 🥂

Cheers for the before & after shots Catherine!

We started tonight by welcoming some of our new members at the Bridge House (even more met us at the task!) and talked about running habits and new year celebrations. James and Jamie had both been for a chilly swim in Eastbourne in the past week :) Then our icebreaker question today was what would you like to do more of this year, with a lovely range of answers from doing more community charity things, to doing more self care and less 'stuff' overall. Which reminds me, I said I'd found out there are seven types of rest and needed a nudge to remember what they all are - so here they are, see which of these you might need to pay a bit of self-care attention to every now and again: Physical rest, social rest, spiritual rest, creative rest, mental rest, sensory rest, and emotional rest. So covering things you might forget you need, like seeing friends, going for a forest walk, playing Lego, whatever works for you :) And back to tonight's task - we then headed the short (but hilly) way to the Water Tower to meet John and our other taskers. Once there we each grabbed a tool and set about the weeding, sorting of rocks and stones, sieving soil through the tried and tested shopping trolley, and digging down til we met concrete. So you could say some of us were movers and some of us were shakers! In fact we did so well that John had to go fetch more bags to pile our hard work in! Then we set off back down the hill, some of us had a little stretch back near our meeting spot, and were happily joined by a passerby who promised to sign up for a future task.