The Paddington Trail raises over £930k for NSPCC
Howard Lake | 26 January 2015 | News
The colourful Paddington statues that appeared across central London last November have been auctioned and raised over £930,000 the NSPCC’s ChildLine service.
The Paddington Trail was launched on 4 November 2014 and featured statues designed by celebrities and artists including Kate Moss, Jonathan Ross, Marc Quinn, Take That, Hugh Bonneville, Michael Sheen and Emma Watson, and, appropriately enough, Bear Grylls. Sponsored by Barclaycard, the public art installation was designed to promote the new film ‘Paddington’.
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Christie’s auction
The first 15 Paddingtons were auctioned in December at Christie’s at an event hosted by Paddington producer David Heyman and his wife Rose, both of whom are longstanding supporters of the NSPCC.
The auction included a Paddington-inspired piece by Tracey Emin and raised over £500,000 for the NSPCC.
International fans of Paddington were given a chance to bid for their own statue in an online auction by
Christie’s. Liam Gallagher’s ‘Parka Paddington’ and Chelsea FC’s ‘The Special One’ were each sold for £13,000. Boris John’s ‘Bear of London’ raised the most, selling for £32,000 to a bidder in East Asia.
The residents of the town of Fleet in Hampshire now have their own Paddington statue, as a result of a successful community crowdfunding campaign to buy Ant & Dec’s ‘Bear Humbug’.
The online auction raised £320,500.
Proceeds from the sale of one bear, Paddington Jack by Davina McCall, were donated to Action Medical Research for whom Paddington has been the official mascot for over 35 years.
Other income for the campaign has come from a range of activities including the sale of miniatures at Selfridges, text donations and other private donations.
Coverage of The Paddington Trail
NSPCC says that mentions of #PaddingtonTrail on Twitter reached over 37.5 million Twitter accounts, which is more than the population of Peru, Paddington’s homeland.
The Trail’s microsite registered 2.2 million views, and the map of the Paddington Trail was downloaded over 90,000 times.
NSPCC Chief Executive Peter Wanless said:
“Thanks to Paddington fans around the world, The Paddington Trail has raised over £930,000 – a fantastic result. This will help run our ChildLine services enabling our trained volunteers to answer hundreds of thousands of contacts from children… Through ChildLine, we are giving children someone to turn to in the same way as Mr and Mrs Brown were there for Paddington.”
About Howard Lake
Howard Lake is consultant editor of UK Fundraising. He founded the site in 1994 and successfully sold it in 2022. As director of Giving X Ltd he is exploring growing giving on a massive scale.
He is the founder of Fundraising Camp and co-founder of GoodJobs.