The Wombles spent 50 years tidying up. Now someone has tidied up who owns them.

The Wombles are getting a new owner. The litter-picking creatures invented on Wimbledon Common have had the worldwide rights to them brought back under a single company and handed to the literary agency behind Harry Potter.

The deal has been billed as a global revival, spanning television, film and a new game. But nothing new has been made yet. What has actually happened is a tidy-up of who owns the Wombles and the hiring of an agent to sell them. No broadcaster has ordered a series; no film has a budget or a release date.

For anyone who grew up in Putney or Wimbledon, this is not an abstract business story. The Wombles were invented on their Common. Elisabeth Beresford came up with the idea on a Boxing Day walk in 1967. Her daughter Kate, struggling with the word “Wimbledon,” called it “Wombledon Common.” The family lived in Wandsworth for much of her life. There is a green plaque on a wall in Earlsfield to prove it.

The question people around here are actually asking is a simple one: will there be new Wombles on our screens, or will we mostly be buying Womble tote bags?

What’s confirmed and what isn’t

The part of the announcement that is genuine news is the rights consolidation. For decades, different slices of the Wombles were owned by different companies (the screen library in one place, the music rights somewhere else, the character and book rights with another party) which made a proper franchise revival almost impossible. That tangle has been resolved. The worldwide rights are now held under a single structure, and The Blair Partnership has been appointed as exclusive global representative across television, film, audio, publishing, theatre, live events, gaming, apps and consumer products.

The new owners say the rights are “consolidated and protected throughout the world” with “no legacy distribution agreements in place.” That last phrase matters: no old contracts in the way.

What is confirmed for the near future is more modest: an official YouTube channel launching this summer with remastered episodes from the 1970s and 1990s, alongside new influencer-fronted live-action clips. There is also a “Be More Womble” charity litter-picking campaign. Films, a television series, a game and audio content are all described as “in development.” In entertainment industry language, that means someone has mentioned them in a meeting. Nothing has been commissioned, budgeted or given a date.

How the rights got so tangled

The Wombles started as a book in 1968, a BBC stop-motion series in 1973 (60 five-minute episodes narrated by Bernard Cribbins) and then became something even more unexpected: the most successful British chart act of 1974. Mike Batt, who composed the theme tune, originally waived his fee of around £200 in exchange for the right to record and perform as The Wombles. In 1974, the band had eight Top 40 singles, four gold albums, and three singles in the chart at the same time.

Those two assets, the screen rights and the music rights, then went separate ways, which is where the tangle begins.

The television producer FilmFair, which made the original BBC series, sold the screen rights repeatedly. They went through Central TV, then a 1991 deal, then in 1996 were bought by the Canadian company CINAR for a reported £10.5m. CINAR hit a financial scandal from 2000; it was sold in 2004 and renamed Cookie Jar; DHX Media (now called WildBrain) acquired Cookie Jar in 2012. That is how the original Wombles screen library ended up inside a Canadian children’s media company. Exactly how the new owners resolved WildBrain’s position in the consolidation has not been disclosed publicly.

The music strand took a different route. Batt and the Beresford children, Kate and Marcus Robertson, consolidated merchandising copyrights into a company in 2013. Batt’s attempt at a new 52-episode CGI series collapsed: only two episodes were ever screened, at a Cambridge event in 2016. He resigned as a director in December 2016 and declared personal bankruptcy in September 2017. His stake was subsequently acquired by businessman Craig Treharne.

Control now sits with Treharne and his partner Nichola Hill through Acre Creative Holdings. Marcus Robertson, representing the Beresford family, retains a minority creative stake in the characters. A dormant brand’s rights fragment because every company that touches it keeps a slice. You cannot sell a global franchise until you have bought the slices back. That work has now been done.

The agency running things

The Blair Partnership was founded in 2011 by Neil Blair and built J.K. Rowling’s Wizarding World into a franchise that third-party analysts value at more than £20bn, from the films to Cursed Child (the highest-grossing play in Broadway history), branded merchandise and the theme parks. If you want to understand what the Wombles might become, however, the Peter Pan precedent is more instructive than the Harry Potter one.

The Blair Partnership also represents the rights to Peter Pan and Neverland on behalf of Great Ormond Street Hospital. The strategy there has been: a style guide first, then publishing (Simon & Schuster), then light-trail experiences at Blenheim in 2024 and Kenwood in 2025, and a game planned for 2027. There is no new Peter Pan film or television series. The logic is that screen content is expensive, uncertain and competitive; licensing, publishing and experiences generate returns at lower risk. Screen comes later, conditionally, once the brand has been proved in the market.

That is almost certainly what “in development” means for the Wombles: a market test. If the YouTube channel draws viewers and the merchandise sells, then a broadcaster becomes an easier conversation.

The honest doubts

The central difficulty for any genuine Wombles revival is that today’s children largely do not know them. There has been no sustained new Wombles content on mainstream screens for roughly 25 years. A 2015 CGI series collapsed; a 2020 update drew criticism for its approach, including from Marcus Robertson himself. A 2023 announcement of a remake was not realised.

A much-cited figure claims 88% public awareness of the Wombles. That figure comes from a brand-commissioned YouGov poll conducted in 2021, measuring adults. There is no publicly available methodology, and it tells you nothing about children under 12, who are the market a new television series would need to reach.

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The more generous read is that the Wombles’ environmental message (“make good use of the things that you find”) is better timed now than it was in 2015. The Paddington films show what is possible when a heritage British property gets outstanding new content: the three films have grossed around £650m worldwide. But Paddington required exceptional screenwriting; the rights were not enough on their own.

Nothing in the announcement contradicts either reading. This could be the beginning of a genuine return, or a well-managed licensing programme for the adults who remember them.

The Wombles, here

The Beresford family lived near Wandsworth Common and later Spencer Park. Wandsworth Council unveiled a green plaque on 5 June 2019 attended by Kate Robertson and Marcus Robertson. AFC Wimbledon’s mascot is Haydon the Womble, which tells you something about how the characters still land locally even without recent screen appearances.

If the “Be More Womble” campaign means anything practical for this area, the Wombles Community Charity (registered charity 1202563) runs a national network of litter-picking groups with an interactive map at thewomblescommunity.com. There may be a Wandsworth or Merton group you can join.

The rights to the fictional litter-pickers have been sorted. The real cleaning-up of the actual Common is, as of this week, being done by volunteers and the Conservators: the Queensmere pond on Wimbledon Common has just been restored, its concrete pool finally gone after more than 50 years.

Great Uncle Bulgaria would approve. Whether he will ever appear on our screens again is a different question.