Now is your chance to buy Northbourne Avenue's iconic Tardis

“Replica of the Tardis from Doctor Who, wired for electricity and plays the soundtrack and Tardis sounds on a pressure timer button,” the description on the Facebook Marketplace listing reads.

“Sold as is and must arrange own transportation from the laneway. Available for viewing.”

And just like that, an icon of Canberra is set to move on.

Doctor Who’s Tardis has been stationed outside Reload Bar and Games on Northbourne Avenue for about four years now, enough to earn its own pin on Google Maps as a “tourist attraction”.

“You can be sitting here on a Monday afternoon and you see 20 different people out the front, getting their photo taken with it,” Reload partner Marc Brown says.

“So it does bring a lot of joy to people.”

It even functioned as a small bar during a woman’s 70th birthday party at the venue.

Ravi Sharma and Jim Andrews founded Reload Bar and Games, together with Token Arcade and Kitchen next door, in 2014 off the back of a very successful internet café across the road in the Sydney Building. Marc came on board about 10 years ago, with added hospitality expertise.

“It was very, very video game orientated when we first started, but it’s evolved to offer everything – Mario Kart, pool tables, karaoke, and a couple of big outdoor areas,” Marc says.

It’s also become famous for its annual Chicken Wing Festival, held at the rear of the building in Verity Lane.

Now, with “different avenues we each want to pursue”, the trio announced in March they would sell the Reload business.

“We’re getting closer to the point it will be sold … but certain things are bit more challenging to sell, like a Tardis,” Marc adds.

A lifelong Doctor Who fan, Marc came across the Tardis in a Queanbeyan wrecking yard around the time of the first COVID lockdown in 2020. It was in “quite a state of disrepair”, but he restored it and installed it in the venue’s outdoor seating area.

But the story really begins with Charlie Bigg-Whither and his wife Sandie Parkes, owners of The Green Shed.

Charlie’s “99 per cent sure” the Tardis is the same one that lived outside their Turner home for years, largely as a plaything for their three kids.

“If you look at it closely, it’s quite weathered and that’s why I got rid of it, because it had lights and noises but the water started to get into it,” he says.

“So I took it to the Green Shed and sold it there for about $1000.”

Charlie commissioned the Cowra Mens’ Shed to build the Tardis about 10 years ago “just to give the old blokes something to do”. He collected it with the help of a tilt-tray truck and forklift and installed it in the family home’s front yard, near a similar English-style phone box.

“It was just fun, and we used it as a publicity thing to be honest – you know, ‘Look what just appeared in our yard last night’, and everybody was all over it.”

Reload is now selling it for $5450, and have already received a “few concrete offers”, according to Marc.

They’re mostly from people like Charlie who want it as an ornament outside their home or business, but there is another small business further along Northbourne Avenue interested, so it may not be moving that far at all.

The telephone has been vandalised three times in the past month, and the sides repeatedly kicked in, but Marc says it’s still “a solid thing”.

“It’s a bit of a bargain for something so unique. But it’s not for the fainthearted. It needs to be a serious buyer.”

He and the rest of the Reload team is sad to see the Tardis leave, but there is an upside.

“We get an email once a month telling us what people are searching for on Google to find our listing,” Marc explains.

“Unfortunately, there’s quite a few people who search for a 24-hour doctor and get directed to our Tardis.”