Pokemon Centre London pop-up Store Take Two: A Much Improved Experience
The Pokémon World Championships took place between August 18th-21st at the ExCel Exhibition Centre in London. Featuring the Pokémon Card Game and also Pokémon Sword and Shield, the event was jam packed with fans, spectators and competitors alike. In addition to the championship events, there was also a Pokémon Centre pop up store not unlike the previous store which was situated as Westfield Shopping Centre in White City, London back in 2019.
I was fortunate to be able to snag a reservation to visit the Pokémon Centre pop up store on Sunday, August 21st and I can confirm that the whole experience was vastly improved upon. You may remember reading about the chaos surrounding the 2019 Pokémon Centre pop up store, with queues lasting upwards of twelve hours just to be able to enter the store. Thankfully, the Pokémon Company have learned from this and a reservation system was created alongside a virtual queuing system for those who did not have reservations to visit the store.
I arrived at the Pokémon Centre pop up store a little before my reservation time, but was allowed to enter the store with no problems. Fortunately, there wasn’t much of a line! As it was the final day of the event, there wasn’t much exclusive London merchandise left apart from badge sets, backpacks and umbrellas. The store was very impressive with a lot of merchandise up for grabs. Small Pokémon plushies were priced between £9.99 to £14.99 and bigger ones were around £18.00. There were a few gigantic Pokémon plushies, of which we saw an Arcanine, which cost £299.99 - as you can imagine there weren’t many of these left for sale by the time I got to the store.
Other than exclusive London merchandise and plushies, the store also hosted a range of trading card sets, the trading card game set and also quite a few different t-shirt designs however, these were priced at £39.99 which I thought was a bit expensive for a t-shirt. One of my favourite items I saw while waling around the store were 3 exclusive boards, what I can only describe as skateboards without wheels. There were 3 different designs and they were beautiful. Unfortunately they were priced at £199.99 otherwise I definitely would have bought the Galarian Ponyta one for my niece.
After walking around the store twice and ultimately deciding to buy a Sir Fetch’d and a Magikarp plush, we decided to take a walk around the venue to see what else was on offer. Unfortunately, all the spectator passes had sold out, so we weren’t able to watch any gameplay. The main concourse of ExCel London is huge though and quite nice to walk along. There was a dedicated trade area where many fans were congregated to trade their Pokémon. There was also a Nintendo Switch demo area where you could play some Pokémon Legends: Arceus should you feel inclined to do so.
An hour or so later, we decided to leave the event and make our way over to the Emirates Airline Cable Cars - which in partnership with the Pokémon event were decorated accordingly! The cable cars take you from Royal Victoria Docks over to North Greenwich Peninsula (Where the O2 Arena is located). Both Cable Car stations had been decorated accordingly - a huge poster captioned with ‘Enjoy your flight’ could be seen just before boarding your cable car.
Every single cable car was decorated with different types of Pokemon! There were separate cars for Rock Type, Grass Type, Fairy Type, Normal Type, Ice Type… You name it, they had it. We boarded the Ghost Type cable car and began our ascent. The views were pretty interesting from the cable car itself - showing the O2 arena and Canary Wharf area of London. The trip was rather short - I don’t think it could have been more than 5 minutes in total. Regardless of this though, it was a really fun activity to try out and the Pokemon themes at both North Greenwich and Royal Victoria Docks was amazing.
It was very refreshing to see that The Pokémon Company have really took on the criticisms voiced from the previous Pokémon Pop-up store and improved the experience ten-fold. The fact that we barely had to wait in line was so wonderful, in-fact we waited in line for the Emirates Airline longer than we waited in line at the pop-up store! If one of these Pop-up stores ends up coming to a location near you, I highly recommend you pay them a visit.