For the first stop on our three-location pop-up tour celebrating the Raspberry Pi Store’s third birthday, we headed to Europe’s biggest shopping centre. Here are a few snaps from our weekend up north at Metrocentre in Gateshead, UK.

We were based on the bank of the River Tyne and managed to squeeze in views of the Gateshead Millennium Bridge and the famous Angel of the North statue.

This was only our second ever pop-up store. We spent Black Friday /me sideeyesweekend last year in the heart of London’s shopping district on Oxford Street. But popping up in a sprawling shopping metropolis was an entirely different experience.

Seeing as Metrocentre is home to more than 300 shops, we were absolutely made up that so many people chose to visit us.

We brought our super knowledgeable and friendly staff from the Cambridge Raspberry Pi Store and they helped loads of visitors to get hands-on with tech and pick out whatever they needed to get started on their own projects.

We all <3 Babbage Bear

We love our Babbage Bear  — who, as you can see from the photo below, is adorable  — and we were touched to find that our pop-up shoppers do too. We were all sold out before the end of our first morning at Metrocentre.

We’re sure that all of the Babbage Bears are settling in nicely to loving new homes. And don’t worry; we’ll bring new stock of Babbages to our next pop-ups.

I missed it! Are you doing another pop-up?

Don’t worry if you couldn’t make this particular pop-up weekend, or if Gateshead is a little too far from home for you. We have two more pop-ups happening this year:

St James Quarter, Edinburgh
Friday 29 & Saturday 30 July

Oxford Street, London 
Friday 29 & Saturday 30 October

Did you come and visit us at Metrocentre? Let us know in the comments what you thought of the store and what you bought.