The Sketch
London Calling 2025 is the third iteration of big event from this group. I went to both of the previous ones (see London Calling 2021 and London Calling 2023). So I’m on a streak. I like a streak where I only have to do something once every two years. This year’s London Calling returned to the same location as the first – the Methodist Central Hall in Westminster. The event also promised to be novel, in that it was given status as a Block Party. That meant a new icon type for me, and, I suspect, for a lot of the others attending. They managed a goodly number of attendees though.
Anyway, back at the plot………….
Saturday isn’t parkrun Day
No parkrun for me today. That’s a bit of a shame, but finding one in central London that I could get to, and then trying to meet up afterwards with my caching buddies would be tricky. And it would mean carrying around another set of clothes and shoes in my overnight bag. And finally it would mean being smelly all day, as I wouldn’t have time or facility for a shower afterwards. So no parkrun.
My day therefore started with a couple of caches in the company of Sadexploration and Candleford, who both stayed in the same hotel as me. Technically, they booked first, so I stayed in the same hotel as them. But that’s being pedantic. Anyway, back at the plot, we had a breakfast date at the Waterloo Station instance of a famous pub chain whose name rhymes with feather moons. Say what you like about the owner, but they do functional and comparatively cheap breakfasts.
On the way there, we grabbed three caches. One SideTracked, one random trad, and one puzzle from the series London Calling had placed.
Spoons was quite empty when we arrived but it filled up quickly. Apparently in the afternoon the Twickenham Rugby Stadium was hosting the annual Army vs Navy game, and Spoons at Waterloo was where quite a few of the supporters decided to get breakfast and start the day’s festivities.
Going a Bit Off-Piste
We met up with Andy33 and CanalCruiser at Spoons and then decided we should maybe go do a bit of geocaching. The plan was to walk across Westminster Bridge to the event site and do some eventing, and then to see what we felt like afterwards.
It all went a bit off piste from the first cache after Spoons (from my perspective). I couldn’t get the Cachly app to retrieve any caches. That put me on the back foot and meant I was trying to play catch-up. Because the others were pushing on, we walked past a couple of perfectly good caches I’d like to have done, but the others were in front. Ho hum!
Matters came to a head on Westminster Bridge, where essentially I had no response to anything. Rather than delay the others I told them I’d just meet them at the event site while I spent a bit of time fighting with my phone. It was very slow, and prone to time-out errors. To be honest I have this kind of thing quite regularly in central London. It doesn’t bother me so much when I’m alone, because I can gop at my own speed, but it bothers me when my phone starts to affect other people’s day. Anyway, the others wandered off toward Parliament Square while I walked over the bridge swearing. Eventually I got everything on the bridge done. And I caught up with the others again crossing the raod near the event site. Not so bad then.
The Block Party
It’s amazing how much mileage the owners of geocaching.com can get out of resurrecting something from the past. I don’t know what a Block Party was originally. Maybe it was something for the American Concept of a block. Anyway, it’s been resurrected this year and has been described on their page as an event of over 500 attendees that is held for one of their specific anniversaries. So fundamentally the same event criteria as a Mega Event, but with the addition of an HQ sanctioned anniversary. Anyway, the net result is that they decided to allow Block Parties in 2025, and London Calling was the first available in the UK. That contributed to attendance being high (no doubt) despite the presence of a Mega in Norway and a Giga in Prague on the same weekend. As per a facebook post I saw after the event, it was the in the top ten most attended events ever in the UK.
So what happened at the event? There was a room full of various vendors and other events pitching their stuff. And there were ten adventure lab stages to be completed. And there were quite a few people. So my trip to the event contained a bit of each of those, to be honest. I knew a few of the stallholders (most of them, in fact), and I knew quite a few people. And I spoke to a few I’d never met whilst in the process of locating the various lab caches and/or sharing the answers. Not that people share the answers at events. No. Nobody does that. Ever.
Obviously I picked up my supporter’s pack too, and I bought a few extra geocoins, just because. Turns out I’d also double-bubbled the event block party coin, so rather than keep two of them, I gave one to skinny49.
Apart from that, the event was event-ish. There were quite a few people I knew, and I chatted to several of them. I guess that’s the point.
Moving On
Come early afternoon I was pretty much peopled and evented out, as were Sadexploration, Andy33 and Candleford too, or so I assumed. The suggestion was that we move on elsewhere. I was happy with that. Not really bothered about where. I assumed we’d go for a bit of caching, but it quickly turned into a liquid lunch (this time at the Two Chairmen, which is apparently Westminster’s oldest pub). We had a couple of beers and stayed in there for quite a long time, to be honest, and spent a happy couple of hours talking to geocaching allcomers, including reviewers from Italy and Ireland. That was good. Probably my favourite watering hole of the weekend.
I could personally feel myself drifting away a little. My enthusiasm had been dented by the service failures at HQ as well as by having beer at lunchtime. But we soldiered on. After the pub we meandered back down to Westminster Bridge, taking in a couple of virtuals and an earthcache on the way by. At the river we turned north to make our way towards the Embankment Station. Technically we were picking our way over towards the evening event at St Pauls, but we had a few hours before then. So we wandered up the riverside doing occasional labs (and swearing about the slow response). Myself and Candleford wandered back over to Whitehall to do the Horseguards virtual, and then back to the riverside. It was busy.
From Embankment we caught a tube to Cannon Street and began the short walk up to the back of St. Pauls. I’m not fully sure why we went to Cannon Street. Mansion House looks closer on the map. Anyway, it was a long-enough walk to warrant a stop at a pub. I think it was The Sugarloaf that we stopped at. I’d had my fill of beer though, and I have to admit the weekend schedule caught up with me a bit. So I had a coke but didn’t have a lot of enthusiasm. I also had a train to catch at St. Pancras at 7. I’d been advised the best routing was to take the Thameslink service from City Thameslink.
One for the Road
Before any of that, I decided to skip the rest of the pub so I could make my way quickly past the 5:30 event and then onwards to St. Pancras. I didn’t stay more than 2 minutes at the event. I’d basically had enough for the weekend so I just fancied a slow amble back to my train. I had toyed with walking, but ultimately plumped for the Thameslink option. By the time I’d found it and then made my way to St. Pancras it was still really only 6pm, so I had an hour to kill. I do find St. Pancras quite confusing though, so I was happy to have plenty of time. I used some of it to turn my bike around, and some more to buy some stuff from Greggs. I’d thought I could eat that on the train, but ultimately I had enough time that I just stood and ate on the station concourse.
The train home was much like a train. I was joined on my table of four by a father and his two young children. They’d been to London for the day and the younger child was having her first trip by train. After 30 minutes of listening to music I had a chat with them. That made a good end to a tiring couple of days. When I got back to East Midlands Parkway my dad was there waiting to collect me, so that all joined up well.
Once I got home I checked to see whether the day’s labs had actually been logged. I could see them on the labs website but the total hadn’t been updated on any of the stats sites. On that basis I decided to leave the bulk of my logs until the following day. Over the course of the two days I logged 257 finds, which is good. OK, most of them were the labs geoart, but given the amount of time spent in the pub, I was happy. It was good to spend a weekend of caching mainly in the company of others rather than alone. Maybe in two years they’ll do another London Calling event.
