Princes Park is the Goodgym Liverpool’s Parkrun home ground, and we’ve litter picked the areas around it – Princes Avenue, Kingsley Street – in the past. There’s a little patch of green just off Granby Street, home to the locally beloved Granby Street Market, which previously was very overgrown and unaccessible due to brambles. The green patch has recently been cleared right back, which revealed both the depth of the greenery, but also a lot of collected litter which was crying out to be collected.

The first pre-task task was hunting down the scattered litter pickers, many thanks to Sallyann for going on a little tour of South Liverpool to collect litter pickers from various goodgymmers and taking them to the task so the others could run unencumbered from our usual spot at the Suitcases on Hope Street.

With litter pickers, hoops, and bags, we met at the corner of the green patch for the task briefing. Bekah stressed the importance of remaining in groups of minimum 2, and gave strict instructions no-one was to wander off on their own!

The task was more challenging than expected, as the overgrown site seems to have attracted some fly tipping. Amongst the litter we could collect were larger items such as a mattress, plywood, and larger household items. Jess commented it was like trying to litter pick a tip! We came across an array of items plus quite bizzarely a load of vegetables, including red cabbage, parsnips, and lots of sprouts. We saw a saw and a saucepan, collected a kettle, and passed a plate. Whilst we had to choose our battles on what we could realistically remove, there was a lot of litter and after filling 16 full bin bags, a crate and a bucket, we had to admin defeat when we ran out of bags!

Given the area has recently been cleared right back, we’re hopeful that was the first step in reclaiming the site. Although there’s still a lot of work to do, we’re happy Goodgym had a solid contribution in making it that little bit clearer.

Personal thanks to Steph for being organized enough to have a spare torch and kindly loaning it to me when I foolishly forgot mine! Congratulations to Naser on his 15th task, and welcome to Mohamed, who we met at Parkrun and who joined us for the first time this evening.

Next up: the first ‘Sticker Saturday’ of the year, there’s much excitement for the return of our monthly Parkrun stickers which so captured our imagination in 2025. The listing is live for sign up and you’re welcome to join us for the run, for breakfast, or both to earn one of the prized stickers for your loyalty card. See you Saturday!

We safely teetered down the hill on our first snowy-icy session for 2026 with run leader Sallyann showing how to do it with abundant balance!

It still felt Christmassy with...

• a layer of ice under a dash of snow

• zero temperature

• northern light photaes with our crazy head torches (courtesy of our fab photoers Steph & Naser & Leonardo)

• also the Christmas chatterings of course!

It was lovely catching up with each other after the Christmas break.

Also we met some lovely new members Amani and Karen , of the amazing Siân noless.

Welcome, welcome and we hope to see more of you in 2026. We also welcomed our newly stolen member from Islington too Alison - yeah for us!

Elaine arrived and explained we had done such a good job on the nettles and thistles it was now time to tackle some of the floor covering weeds too hopefully to give some of the non-weeds a chance in the spring. Those floor covering weeds also included litter which always a joy to clear up!

Seven bags later we felt we had made a good start to 2026 and put to bed our last days of 2025.

Thank you all for turning up in the cold and giving that good doing warmth and I cannot wait to spend more of my 2026 doing good with you guys and guyettes xxx

Today we were back to see Pat at one of our favourite regular task sites, the wonderful Greenhouse Project on Lodge Lane, which is a multi-cultural early years education centre focused on play, arts and nature. We have helped out there in a variety of ways over the years including mulching, cleaning, litterpicking, pruning, weeding, and even sticking leaves to a hedge, but tonight was our lovely annual task of gift wrapping presents for the local children who attend the Greenhouse. As it usually is, this was our last task of the year, and a treat to be indoors at this time of year for a cosy, festive evening fuelled by mince pies and full of chatter and good cheer.

With such lovely vibes the gift wrapping is always a very popular task, and this year we outdid ourselves with nineteen attendees including not one, not two but three new members turning out for their first task - welcome Craig, Tsitsi and Saoirse! We weren't even sure if we would all fit into the one room but luckily everyone managed to squeeze in to find a big pile of toys, games, craft sets and art supplies waiting to be wrapped. With so many keen volunteers we had all of the gifts wrapped and labelled super quickly, leaving plenty of time for chatting and catching up before the end of the session. Steph H showed us a video of her performing her excellent solo at the wonderful Choir With No Name Christmas gig a few days ago. Lucien and I will be leaving Liverpool at Christmas time and although we will definitely be back to visit - and hopefully soon - we aren't sure when or even if we will be back to live, so the group gave us a lovely send-off at what could be our last task for a while with a very thoughtful card and present, and a beautiful speech given by Sallyann. We will miss you all so much!

On this bittersweet note we all said our goodbyes, wishing everyone a happy holiday, and set off into the cold outside, warmed from the inside by the happy glow of another year of doing great things as part of an amazing community.