Fans of Winnie the Pooh will soon be heading to Ashdown Forest to relive Pooh Sticks in the very place where the game was created 90 years ago.
The recently repaired Pooh Bridge in Hartfield, where twigs are dropped in the water as part of a race, is all set for a literary revival with the authorised sequel ‘The Best Bear in all the World’ expected to draw nostalgic parents and their children to the famous landmark.
Written by Brian Sibley, Kate Saunders, Paul Bright and Jeanne Willis, the collection of short stories is due to be published this October and will include the new character Penguin – inspired by a picture of AA Milne and his young son, Christopher, with a toy penguin.
Mr Sibley has described the idea of returning to Ashdown Forest, on which the fictional Hundred Acre Wood is set, in search of a new story as ‘wildly exciting’.
Penguin’s debut will be in the short story ‘Winter: In Which Penguin Arrives in the Forest’, which will feature the original characters meeting him as he arrives in The Hundred Acre Wood.
Mr Sibley added: “The thought of Pooh encountering a Penguin seemed no more outlandish than his meeting a kangaroo and a tiger in a Sussex wood.”
