Friday, June 24, 2011

Visit to the nerd capital

So last year, to celebrate finishing my PhD, my wife and I visited England. We spent most of our trip in Liverpool, with trips down to London, Down House (Darwin's estate) and Nottingham. Luckily she had super awesome friends in Nottingham. They showed us around the sights, and went with us to find and visit GW HQ. The place was surprisingly difficult to find. It's in a kind of industrial area, and would be easy to pass were it not for this guy on the side of the road:



The aquilas all over the buildings helped, too:



Here's a sweet diorama they had set up out front. You may have seen it in White Dwarf. There's so much character and so many little vignettes going on. I don't want to spam all the pics of it, but it's really amazing in person. Bonus that it's Hive Fleet Behemoth, the best hive fleet (sorry Mike).




This board was pretty funny. It was cool to visit the HQ for a couple hours, but I wouldn't make it part of my honeymoon!



For some reason I don't have good pics of the gaming area (an amazing large room full of all those tables you see in WD, available to play on for free.) Also no good pics of the interior of Bugman's. But I do have lots of pics of the Miniature Hall:



The best part is the whole room is dark until someone comes in. Then, one by one, lights slowly "thunk" on from the front of the room to the back. Epic fantasy style music starts playing as well. It was pretty awesome, and amused me greatly. Here's some sample pics from the hall (I have tons more):

If you haven't seen this before, you will now. Nurgle baneblade, best baneblade:



These were the only deffskulls in the entire hall. Such a bummer!:



Old-school models and dioramas:





My favorite painter, Darren Latham doing one of my favorite models:


My wife knew to go straight to the Salamanders area of the hall. She took lots of pics of them for me. But I'll spare you all with the previous and this really cool banner bearer:



Some nice dioramas on display:




Finally, the outside of Bugman's:



The tavern was pretty cool, all done up in a fantasy style. Full bar and food was available, though we didn't have time to sample anything. I bought a few odds and ends, including a print of this iconic 40k art:



So that was my exciting trip to GW-HQ! Shame I couldn't get any games in, or meet any e-celebs/designers, but moving models across the pond wasn't going to happen, and all the dev work seems to go on in a separate, (and totally locked down) building. Hope you all enjoyed a peek inside nerd central.

1 comment:

  1. Man Behemoth isn't the coolest

    Also grats on the 50th post at FC40k

    ReplyDelete