Mainland London at London City

A bit of a rollercoaster weekend. Over far too quickly, but they say the best ones are.

On Friday, Madame Lala's opened for a great evening of entertainment with the wonderful Cher singing in Revue and on Saturday the Bee Gees of` `73 performed in Regent's Park to a packed sim.




Then by Sunday, Mainland London Soho had relocated to it's new home in our new London City Estate.

There wasn't any tearful good byes, as everyone grabbed their stuff from our old mainland sim and headed for London City, to find an exact replica of Mainland London Soho and re-rezzed their bits and pieces.  In fact it felt rather surreal.

Mephilo Tor on the mainland has been home to Mainland London for ten months since it started as a little 8,000 meter parcel featuring just Soho Square.   

Bill and I had always thought that would be enough.  Ten stores and a chance to put our feet up for once and play in SL rather than work our socks off.  However it was easier than we expected and the 10 shops were rented before we had even opened and we knew immediately that we were going to need to expand.  

Next we acquired land which become the Regent's Park shopping mall and the same thing happened.  Eveything was rented during the building phase.   And so it continued until we acquired every empty parcel that ever came on sale, evenually ending up with a full mainland region, 70 stores and 16,000 members in our groups and a large team of terrific and supportive staff.

We were so chuffed with the success of this community, but in the backs of our mind, we were also aware of two possible problems, both of which came to fruition early in June.

Firstly, being mainland, only 40 people could visit the sim at the same time, which is fine during a lot of the time, but a nightmare whenever any event was being run as the sim would fill and leave a lot of disappointed people asking why they couldn't get in.    Secondly, on mainland, you cannot choose your neighbours.  Someone can buy connecting land and arrive in your community whether you like it or not.

This was the deciding factor for us and early in June we formed our own estate, London City.  This estate immediately solves both problems.  100 avatars can visit and no one can buy land nearby without permission.

It also solves a third problem that was always going to happen at some stage.   What if we wish to expand further?   Well now we can.  We just have another region turned on and it is as simple at that.

I am mighty proud of our achievements on Mephilo Tor sim and I will miss it.  It was a great home for all of us, but in the end, our family outgrew the house.

Neither Bill nor I ever dreamed that Mainland London would end up being anything close to a sim.  We has just wanted a small area for a club and a few stores, but who are we to ignore demand? :)

We still have a lot of work to do on the new region.   All the buildings are done, but it will take another week of faffing around with the refinements to get it spot on.

The London City team check out the new boozer.

All things being equal, we expect to hold an official opening party for Mainland London in the London City Estate on Friday 17th June.

We hope you can be there.  You are the very people who made this all possible and we offer our humble thanks to our crew and the community that supports Mainland London and all it has become and all that it will be.