Walker Stalker Con 2016, London

We had a trip to London Olympia to Walker Stalker Con – not quite a convention for fans of The Walking Dead, but almost. Most of the stars there are from TWD, but there were people from a few other shows too, including Breaking Bad and the Boondock Saints films. We started, as we often do with trips out, with McBreakfast.

McNom.

Getting There

We were only there for the Sunday, but we drove down to London on the Saturday, and met up with friends for the afternoon and early evening, eating a lot at an all-you-can-eat Chinese buffet. I wouldn’t say the food was good, but there was a lot of it, and Chinese food is pretty delicious even when it’s not the best, so we enjoyed it.

On the Sunday morning, we got up and headed out. It wasn’t too early a start, as the doors did open until 10:00. We didn’t want to be at the back of a long queue, so we aimed to get there for around 09:00. We ended up being even earlier than that, and we were at the back of a long queue.

The Queues

Fortunately, even well before the event was due to start, watching the crowd was fun – lots of people, and a good proportion of them were dressed up for the event, cosplaying as various Walking Dead characters, including a lot of dead people. Well, they weren’t dead, exactly, just… rotting.

Once in, the queuing started again, with Sam needing to queue for a photo with Andrew Lincoln. Again, there were people around to see, including a great cosplay of Tyreese.

Queueing was the theme of the event. We had to queue again for the panel discussion with Andrew and Norman Reedus, and Sam queued again for her photo with Josh McDermitt. All the queueing was quite well organised, though, with one exception. The queue for the panel upset a few people – everyone was told to queue towards the back of the panel area, and after people had been standing there for quite some time (probably at least half an hour in some cases, maybe an hour), they were told to turn around because the queue was going in the other way. People who had queued to be reasonably near the front (after the VIP and higher priced tickets, anyway) were suddenly near the back. We were in the middle either way.

People seemed to take the news ok, though, and we were soon heading in.

The Panel

We had tickets for the panel discussion with Andrew Lincoln and Norman Reedus – Rick and Daryl from The Walking Dead. Sam had managed to get tickets, which were quite sought-after, having been reasonably cheap by con standards. The discussion was interesting and fun – after working closely together for so long, the pair clearly had fun together, and got on well. Someone worried Andrew by knowing where he lived, which rather threw him. He’d just invited them over, and didn’t expect them to reply that they lived five minutes from him, so that would be nice. When someone else wanted to know which limbs he’d choose to have damaged, he was quite relieved that they didn’t live near him.

I took quite a few pics of the panel, but as usual with me, my interest was more taken with the people around watching the show, especially the others photographing it.

It was a tiring trip, and a very expensive one, and I won’t be doing it again, but it was always for Sam, not for me, and she had a great time.

The Best Photos

Before we get to the album of what I think were my best photos from Walker Stalker Con, we’ll have this big pano I made – it’s made up of a lot of photos, including quite a few of the other good ones, and opening it large and scrolling around will hopefully give you a bit of a feel for what the event was like: