Published by Dispatch
Words by Peter Carlyon
Illustration by Daniele Morganti
Dispatch launched last year as a London-based digital magazine, publishing a couple of stories per week. It’s particularly interested in the peripheries, telling the sort of stories that might not find space elsewhere, and I loved this one on Nottingham’s surprisingly lucrative tabletop gaming industry. I hope you’ll enjoy it too, and I hope you’ll take a look at their site to see the full range of their storytelling.
Shortly after Alex Huntley was born, the roof of Bilsthorpe Colliery caved in, killing three men. It was August 1993 and, across Nottinghamshire, pits that weren’t collapsing were being filled with liquid concrete, sealed off for good. In Nottingham itself, the last of the city’s lacemakers were being squeezed out of their factories.
If the industries surrounding Alex’s birth were already in terminal decline, by the time he reached adulthood something else was taking their place. Nottingham, improbably, was becoming a city of war games.
Today, after Boots, the city’s biggest private employer is Games Workshop, the maker of the tabletop phenomenon Warhammer 40,000. Founded in 1975, the company now employs more than 3,000 people across paint factories, plastics plants, design studios, a sprawling headquarters in Lenton, and the jewel in its multi-billion-pound crown: Warhammer World.