Six to Start teamed up with the team at Faber Kids and award-winningauthor Beardy Ardagh (known to grown-ups at Philip Ardargh) to launch Visit Grubtown, a new website from Grubtown’s Tourist Board, featuring a new look at six Grubtown locations and a special new Grubtown Story: Grubtown and the Golden Pineapple.

Bringing Grubtown to life

When we sat down to talk with Faber about what we could do with their Grubtown series of books, what struck us was the absolutely terrific characters, world and storytelling. We’re always suckers for great story. And what felt instinctive to us: rather than creating a Flash game, what we really wanted to do was to let kids who loved the Grubtown world dive in and explore it.

We’re big fans of maps, too.

We ended up creating two things: a new story, called Grubtown and the Golden Pineapple, set amongst 5 different locations in Grubtown.

There are some great touches. To register for the site, you need to get your Press Pass from the Grubtown Daily Herald. One thing about Grubtown is the stupendously funny names of all of the characters. There’s Jilly Cheeter and Mango Claptrap, of course, but we thought it’d be a nice treat for all of the site’s readers to get their own Grubtown name too. You can try it out at the Press Pass and get a name like Quincy Dog-Earred or Flimsy Samba. Coming up with the names for the name generator was great fun.

We were very excited to be able to work with Philip Ardagh to tell a new story – Grubtown and the Golden Pineapple – and have it feature 5 different Grubtown locations that we could show in an interesting way to existing and new fans of Grubtown.

(That’s a small Beardy Ardagh)

(There’s Chief of Police Grabby Hanson).

And a Newspaper, too

We also built The Grubtown Daily Herald, one of the two newspapers* of record in Grubtown. A great thing about Grubtown is that it’s such a wonderful place to tell stories, and producing the first version of The Grubtown Daily Herald online lets the most enthusiastic readers of Grubtown participate in a meaningful way with the story and the world. There’s a range of ways to take part: from submitting full-length articles, to shorter, more guided pieces, like restaurant and film reviews.

We’ve even teamed up with our friends at Newspaper Club to give children the fantastic chance of having their work published in a limited-edition 12-page printed edition of the Grubtown Daily Herald, gathering the best stories from the five weeks, as selected by Philip Ardagh.

We’re really proud of what we’ve created with Faber and Philip and Jim. It’s a great start to help bring the wonderful world of Grubtown to more people.

Visit Grubtown was produced by the following team at Six to Start:

• Dan Hon (Exec Producer, Writer)
• Lisa Long (Project Manager)
• Anthony Cartmell (Web Development)

… with the help of the following people at Faber and Faber:

• Silvia Novak
• Susan Holmes
• Matthew de Ville

and with the help of:

• Philip Ardargh (story) and
• Jim Paillot (illustrations)

* The Grubtown Daily Herald and The Grubtown Weekly Gerald