A few months back Rod, of A Journal of Improbable Things Podcast, and I decided it might be rather nice if we organised a Doctor Who Twitter fan meet up in the form of a picnic, or Twitnic if you will. We then realised that we’d probably need to wait until the summer for good enough weather and being as impatient as I am, plans were changed to so we could be inside if the weather was bad. And the legend of Twubcrawl was born!
The idea of the Twubcrawl was for Doctor Who fans who knew each other via twitter to meet up and get to know each other in real life. Combining pubs with a few filming locations en route seemed the logical step for a Doctor Who tour guide.
The event took place on Saturday 2nd April 2011.
We started at The Centre Page on Knightrider Street in The City, the location of the Cyberman invasion in the Patrick Troughton serial The Invasion. We had a lovely view of St Paul’s Cathedral as we waited for the first guests to arrive. I’m not going to lie, I was pretty nervous and wondering if anyone was actually going to turn up since the whole event had relied almost entirely on word of tweet, if you will. Turns out I didn’t need to be worried at all!
Lots of people, including The Pharos Project crew, turned up and soon we had a pretty decent sized pub crawl going on! We even had a Fourth, Eighth, and Eleventh Doctor turn up, one of whom managed to get themselves on Canadian telly within about 5 minutes of arriving!
After some drinking and Rod and I unconvincingly re-enacting Cybermen walking down Knightrider Street for his podcast, we headed across the Millennium Bridge towards The Globe and Cardinal Cap Alley used in the The Shakespeare Code and Talons of Weng Chiang respectively. We did manage to cause a little bit of trouble on the bridge as we held up tourists while we took photos of the folks in costume!
Making it safely to The Anchor on Bankside and tweeting our new location we were joined by more Twubcrawlers…..in fezzes. Twubcrawlers wear fezzes now, fezzes are cool. I think the total count for the funky hats came to 6. It certainly was a Feztastic day! What do you mean feztastic isn’t a word? Well it is now, ok? We were also joined by the Staggering Stories podcast at this point who had just been to The Doctor Who Experience and had acquired a cute little Adipose stress toy, “Gray-am” who too joined in with the festivities.
To get to our next pub, the Old Thameside Inn we went via Clink St, another location from Talons of Weng Chiang, where we were given an impromptu talk about the serial’s filming by a lovely guy who worked at the Clink Prison Museum who seemed to know a lot about the stories and the episodes themselves. Well, it saved me the job of saying it all!
Fast forwarding a little we went via Southwark Cathedral (The Lazarus Experiment) and along to the Horniman at Hays for something to eat to soak up all the drink! It was then on to our final stop for some lovely twilight group photos in the Shad Thames/Butler’s Wharf area (where Resurrection of the Daleks was filmed) before settling at The Dean Swift on the corner of Lafone St. where the hardcore pub crawlers among us had a well earn cup of tea with a shot of milk (much to the barman’s disgust)!
All in all I think it was a pretty successful day. Everyone seemed to enjoy themselves. Lots of new friends were made, lots of TARDIS cupcakes eaten and many, many giggles had. I even managed to get myself onto 2 podcasts, which was a little bit of a crazy experience I must say. It was also a nice way to introduce people to our tour of London Locations.
If you missed out on the action you can find photos and podcasts etc covering the event at the links below:
The Pharos Project Podcast including a chat with Rod and I (please note there is some adult language used in this podcast as well as much drunken rambling from The Pharos Project guys! You have been warned.)
Video from the Beeblebrox Co
Sad that you missed the Twubcrawl? Don’t fret! We shall be organising another event in the summer break between the first and second halves of Series 6. This time it’ll be a Twitnic in a Doctor Who location. Follow us on twitter @DW_Tours for all the updates . We might even manage another Twubcrawl in the Autumn…
-x- Helen -x-
