Last week, I joined a small group of people who decided to take over the front carriage of a London Overground train travelling from Highbury & Islington down to Forest Hill, and conduct an impromptu series of talks.

The event was called ‘Journey through the connected world’ and was devised by Made by Many as part of Internet Week (Europe).

It was a great little event. The other speakers were excellent and it was really interesting to see how each person chose to adapt to what was a rather unusual venue, an audience that was coming and going, and some pretty tough time restrictions.  

It’s been blogged about here: http://lbbonline.com/news/iwe-journey-through-the-connected-world/; and Storified here: http://storify.com/crashtherocks/journey-through-the-connected-world-iwe

My contribution was to read out a story starting at Surrey Quays and ending at Forest Hill. I’d been inspired by how many Sherlock Holmes stories had been situated in South East London, and wanted to create my own little melodrama in the spirit of Conan Doyle (who lived near Norwood Junction for quite a while btw).

I started out by mapping out the territory, absorbing as many Holmes references as I could, and then imagining what kind of story could play out on a train chuntering through the modern-day ‘dark heart’ of South East London.

It became a curious tale of two boxes, one of which I was carrying with me on the train. We were on the hunt for a famous jewel that had been stolen in Norway and had then come into the UK via Tilbury and Woolwich. The hope was that I was holding a box that contained the jewel, and thus we would thwart the criminal mastermind who had planned this theft.

Alas, things went awry and it was clear the box I was holding was nothing but a decoy full of deadly microbes. The alert came from one of my spies, Captain Basil, sitting on Honor Oak Park station platform.

Captain Basil lived long enough to send me a sign about where the genuine jewelcase  had probably been dumped, now that it was clear we were in hot pursuit, somewhere often used by others as an emergency South London drop point for stolen goods in years gone by. ‘PICKLES‘.

Fortunately, my fellow travellers and I managed to escape death ourselves, thanks to meeting another man at Forest Hill, who could furnish all of us with medicines held in his collection of mysterious vials, to counter the effects of any poison we may have absorbed from my pointless casket.

Sadly I think some of our number my have drunk from the wrong vial and sealed their own peculiar fate. Perhaps that was always the intention of this little demonstration anyway– to target one person and wreak a deadly revenge, all under the guise of a piece of harmless transmedia play…

I’ve put recordings of what was read on the train on Soundcloud btw:

And you can print out a copy of the booklet that everyone was given using the ever-marvellous bookleteer here: http://bookleteer.com/book.html?id=2705#page/1/mode/1up. So in theory you could sit on the Ginger Line with something to listen to and something to read. I can’t guarantee that there’ll be someone at Forest Hill to save you from an excruciatingly painful death, I’m afraid.

A lot of the links you might require in order to piece things together can be found also on Twitter (@ GingerLeague). Big thanks to Andy and Vince for being my stooges at Honor Oak Park and Forest Hill. If there’s a group of people who’d like to run this again at any time – or perhaps help me develop it a bit further, do let me know.