Plastic warrior show 18th May

It’s a great show. Lots of stuff for sale - in various scales - much of it well priced. And it’s 180+ miles each way for me!

I'm a bit late picking up this thread but to give a bit of background, Plastic Warrior magazine was set up in 1985 to encourage an interest in collecting, wargaming and modelling with 54mm plastic figures. The first show in 1986 was actually an "open day" for enthusiasts to meet and display their favourite figures rather than the swapmeet it has become today, it also included a massive castle siege wargame staged by Ross Perry who's dad, Frank Perry (F.E. Perry), had written the First and Second Books of Wargaming, it took so long to set up all the terrain and figures there was no time to play the game before we had to pack up. Another feature, which would continue in subsequent years was the "fight", a medieval duel performed by a pair of amateur reenactors who hacked at each other with broadswords until one of them was hospitalised with concussion.

In 1987 the second show featured three wargames, a superb Mexican Revolution scenario by the Skirmish Wargames Society, members of Stuart Asquith's Rayners Lane wargame club arrived dressed in Davy Crockett buckskins to refight the Alamo and there was also an Indiana Jones "Temple of Doom" game. The Rayners Lane group continued to provide the wargames for the next couple of years with a WW2 Western Desert game in 1988 and Stuart Asquith put on his "Little Wars" game, complete with matchstick firing 4.7s in 1989. During this period we increasingly had to hire tables to dealers to cover the costs of the halls.

We have always had problems securing a venue for the show and in 1990 we ended up using the garden area of the London Toy Museum, setting up around their outdoor exhibits there was very limited space so the wargames and fight had to be dropped and there was just 1 display table. By this time the show was developing more into it's current format so that now it is entirely taken up by people selling figures, largely reflecting the fact that PW subscribers interest in collecting has outstripped wargaming, although there is a very large body of us who collect and model figures for wargaming.

This year there will be 53 tables, about half of which will be ordinary collectors clearing out surplus stuff from their collections, with several coming over from the Continent, so you can never be sure what might turn up. It's predominantly 54mm plastic, both old and new production but also 1/72 Airfix, some of the rare collectable stuff is expensive but there are always a lot of junk boxes with figures that are very cheap. All you can ever be certain of is that there will be an awful lot of stuff!

Hope this helps.