The Warhammer Capital of the World

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.

Its reclusive chief executive, Kevin Rountree, of whom no public photographs exist, was named The Sunday Times “business person of the year” in 2024. The company’s market capitalisation recently rose above £6 billion – higher than EasyJet, Marks & Spencer, or Manchester United. 

Inspired by its success, a dense ecosystem of businesses, freelancers and hobbyists has taken shape across the city, as former employees set up their own international firms. More than 20 local companies are in the business of making figurines, with others dedicated to printing magazines, running painting academies, writing books and developing rulebooks. Locals call it “the Lead Belt”, a nod to the metal once used to cast the figurines. 

When Alex Huntley left school, he chose Nottingham Trent University to be close to this world. “It was like Shangri-La for me,” he recalls. Now 32, he looks a little like an action figure himself, with broad, cartoonish features and a fondness for muscle-fit T-shirts. He is, however, more Silicon Valley than space marine.

In his final year, Alex dropped out of university to focus on his games company, Warp Miniatures. In late November last year, he opened Warp as a brick-and-mortar figurine shop in the centre of town. “We’re in a golden age for tabletop gaming” he says. The timing couldn’t have been better.

I arrive at Warhammer World a little after 9am, on an unremarkable industrial estate squatting on the banks of the River Leen. It’s a grey, gated sprawl of warehouses – the sort of place designed for articulated lorries and travelling salesmen. The complex isn’t officially open yet, but inside the action is already underway. 

Eighty men have travelled here for a Warhammer 40,000 tournament, built around Games Workshop’s most enduring creation. Launched in 1983, the game unfolds in a dystopian science-fiction universe where vast human empires, alien species and demonic “chaos” factions are pitted against one another. 

When I arrive, everyone is talking feverishly about tactics, immersed in the first of five three-hour games spread out over the weekend. Each player has spent dozens of hours assembling and meticulously painting their army. Once, Games Workshop staff played volleyball and badminton in this space. Since its conversion into a tournament hall in 1999 – complete with faux-cobbled floors meant to evoke a castle courtyard – it has become a place of pilgrimage.

Matteo and his friends flew in from Rome last night, their first outing as a team. They made the effort “because Nottingham is the home” of Warhammer, says Matteo, in his late 20s. They spent the previous evening playing at a hobby shop in town. 

“It’s the mecca, ain’t it?” shrugs Tom, in his mid-30s, who drove up from Portsmouth the night before. Like a lot of players, he emphasises that while the large countdown clock and the frenetic energy radiating from some tables can make things seem competitive, the spirit is mostly communal. By contrast, the UK Tournament Circuit (UKTC) is where the hardcore players ply their trade, a series of “grand tournaments” that took place in Nottingham in January. 

If Warhammer World represents the commercial apex of Nottingham’s lead belt, longtime players in the city often gravitate towards a more underground scene. In Carlton, a quiet residential suburb five miles east, Curtis Fell of Ramshackle Games unlocks the doors to his paint-spattered workshop. 

“I’m the struggling artist side of things,” he says cheerfully. Curtis once worked as an animator on the film Chicken Run before sustaining an eye injury during a Viking re-enactment. “I got hit in the eye with a sword,” he explains. “After that, I didn’t want to do animation.” Such injuries are not unheard of in the local wargaming world: legendary Games Workshop sculptor Michael Perry blew his right hand off with a cannon during a Napoleonic war re-enactment in 1996. He later taught himself to sculpt left-handed. 

Using buckets of polyurethane resin and a trio of vacuum-chamber pressure pots, Curtis’s workshop looks more like a meth lab than a games studio. He sculpts for the hobby’s punkier fringe, working with a self-made tool filed out of a coat hanger. He plays niche titles – Turnip 28, a post-apocalyptic game set in future Europe, is a current favourite – with other indie outfits across the city. This includes Bad Squiddo Games, Knuckle Bones Miniatures, Warp Miniatures, as well as the employees of larger companies like Warlord Games and Games Workshop who want to play different titles in their spare time. 

“Everybody’s here,” says Curtis. “It’s unique.” 

Yet despite this density of wargaming obsessives, many players I speak to feel that Nottingham has long lacked suitable public spaces to play beyond Warhammer World itself. Several community groups avoid Games Haven, a gaming venue near the city centre, because of its association with Matthew Adlard, a convicted sex offender.

While Games Haven was operating under the name Leadbelt Arena in 2023, Adlard was listed as a co-director of the company – Hobbyspotz Retail Limited – along with the present manager of Games Haven, Gary Powell. “People continued to see Matt Adlard at this venue, despite Gary promising that he’d have nothing to do with it any more,” says Leigh, a local gamer and advocate for improved inclusivity in war games. When I contacted Games Haven, a spokesperson said that Adlard was banned in 2023, safeguarding policies have been introduced, and staff undergo enhanced DBS checks. 

In more recent years, public spaces for gaming have improved: Nottingham Library now hosts War Games Club, whereas Underworld Games and Element Games both host games nights in town. Sixteen people are absorbed in a game of Halo: Flashpoint when I visit Mantic Games, a shop and games studio about 30 minutes north of Nottingham’s centre. The Dragon Lodge also recently opened in the city – the UK’s first Masonic lodge to be themed around wargaming.

Over the past decade or so, tabletop gaming has experienced a cultural ascendancy. Many older players admit they were once embarrassed to speak openly about their hobby. That self-consciousness is fading.

When Superman actor Henry Cavill sheepishly confessed his love of Warhammer 40,000 on The Graham Norton Show in 2021, a bemused Norton teased him. Four years on, Cavill is the star and executive producer of an upcoming Amazon series set in the Warhammer 40,000 universe. His press junkets are routinely derailed by questions about which armies he’s currently painting. 

Other franchises have followed a similar arc. Netflix’s Stranger Things triggered a renewed fascination with Dungeons & Dragons, a trend that has spilled over into board games more broadly. Alongside Halo and Worms, even My Little Pony has entered the tabletop arena, licensing its first role-playing game – My Little Pony: Tails of Equestria – to Nottingham-based companies. 

A post-pandemic hunger for in-person socialising has certainly helped. But it would be misleading to see the rise of wargaming as purely organic. Games Workshop’s dominance rests in large part on its mastery of intellectual property. The company has spread its worlds across formats with remarkable efficiency: video gamers have Space Marine 2; readers can choose from more than 400 novels set within the Warhammer universe.

And last August, its success even became a geopolitical footnote. Frustrated members of the Ukrainian special forces gave interviews to The Telegraph complaining that Games Workshop had stopped translating Warhammer novels into Ukrainian. In protest, they petulantly rechristened the firm “Wanker’s Workshop”. 

For much of its history in Nottingham, Games Workshop was effectively the only serious wargaming employer in town. After a private equity takeover in 1991, the company moved its global headquarters two miles west to Lenton. Designers, sculptors and painters followed, as did sales and marketing people. But as the company evolved, it would periodically shed employees. Many went on to found their own businesses nearby. 

“We’re all too idle to move away,” jokes John Stallard, co-founder of Warlord Games, whose factory is also based in Lenton. Two ceremonial swords rest beside his desk, beneath a calendar bearing the image of a labrador. Stallard had been head of global sales at Games Workshop until he was let go in 2007. Soon after, he and fellow alumnus Paul Sawyer founded Warlord Games, which focuses on historical tabletop battles. A similar story played out for Ronnie Renton, who founded Mantic Games in 2008 after leaving Games Workshop. Today, Warlord employs around 110 people in Nottingham; Mantic between 20 and 30.

Beyond family ties and a reluctance to uproot, Nottingham made sense commercially. Many of those leaving Games Workshop were, as Renton puts it, “the best rules writers in the world.” Among them was Alessio Cavatore, who co-developed later editions of Warhammer Fantasy Battle before helping to create Bolt Action for Warlord and Kings of War for Mantic as a freelancer. 

“Warlord and Mantic didn’t set out to build the Lead Belt,” Ronnie says. “What we did was live in Nottingham along with a load of other talent, so therefore we could access that talent and make products that were going to be able to be world-beaters.”

Why Nottingham? And why not anywhere else? A romantic might reach for Robin Hood – for a city steeped in myth and fables of which fantasy figurines are just another incarnation. 

But reality is not so sentimental. Nottingham’s transformation into a wargaming capital can be traced to the drive and vision of a single figure: Bryan Ansell. 

Games Workshop was founded in London in 1975 by three school friends – Ian Livingstone, Steve Jackson and John Peake – working out of a shared flat in Shepherd’s Bush. It grew gradually into a chain of cult retail shops. Ansell was a sculptor, crafting miniature orcs out of Airfix Robin Hood figures from a workshop in Nottingham’s Lace Market. 

As his figurines became indispensable to Games Workshop, Ansell demanded more control of the business. By the early ‘80s, he was manufacturing all of Games Workshop’s 28mm figures from a folk museum in Newark, and had co-developed Warhammer Fantasy Battle with Rick Priestley and Richard Halliwell in 1983. The London leadership, meanwhile, remained focused on retail expansion and on White Dwarf, the company’s magazine. Ansell wanted the company to orient itself around figurines – and around Nottingham.

What followed was a prolonged game of brinkmanship. Ansell repeatedly resigned, or threatened to, each time extracting greater authority. In 1985, he drove down to the London headquarters in a red Lotus Esprit Turbo and told Livingstone and Jackson that he would be leaving if he wasn’t granted more control. “It was as though we had learned nothing from the last time he resigned,” Livingstone reflected in his 2023 book Dice Men. Ansell was appointed managing director of Games Workshop and later purchased the company outright. Within six months, he’d shuttered the warehouses in Ealing, relocating operations to Eastwood, Nottinghamshire. 

In the years since Ansell entrenched wargaming into the city, the hobby has gravitated towards the mainstream. Several players I spoke to insisted that wargaming is now part of Nottingham’s cultural zeitgeist, like a football team, celebrated by the city at large. And yet, for many residents with no direct connection to the scene, it remains almost invisible. When the MP for Nottingham East, Nadia Whittome, cut the ribbon at the opening of Warp Miniatures in late November, she remarked that she had only just learned that Nottingham was known as the “Lead Belt”. 

One barrier to wider recognition may be who the hobby appears to be for – and who it appears to exclude. Many women paint miniatures, but far fewer play. Parts of the industry remain openly resistant to the idea of change. When I asked John Stallard of Warlord Games whether more women were taking an interest in his products, he bristled. “You had to get that one in, didn’t you?” he snapped. “Nobody interested in historical wargaming are women. It’s a lazy journo question. Don’t like that.” 

It’s true that none of those shopping in Warlord Games on the day I visited were women, even if several of its employees were. Yet just a few miles away there is Bad Squiddo Games, a historical miniatures company founded by Annie Norman which specialises in WW2 heroines – such as Soviet sniper Lyudmila Pavlichenko and British spy Odette Sansom – and what she calls “believable female miniatures”. It’s about creating figurines “that would have made the hobby far better for my 10-year-old self,” she explains on her website. 

Back over at Warp, there’s also a focus on producing games that are more appealing to women. Wingshan Huntley, who is married to Alex, has developed Siren’s Oath: a tabletop role-playing game which involves mermaid witches deciding the fate of a city. 

In reality, the next chapter of Nottingham’s lead belt will likely continue to be written by Games Workshop. Last year, shares in the company rose by almost 50%, adding another couple of billion onto the company valuation. Newer outfits like Warp Miniatures and Bad Squiddo Games feel like ripples in the culture around wargaming, closer to the punk scene that Curtis inhabits than Warhammer’s commercial dominance. “We’re like the craft beer of tabletop gaming,” Alex admits. 

It is dark when I leave Warp, on a bitter December evening edging towards closing time. As for how the business is faring, Alex maintains it’s too early to tell. There are promising signs, though. The final stragglers are a couple of children, no older than eight, carefully assembling their orcs. They are the wargaming city’s latest recruits, and certainly not its last.

Dispatch is a modern magazine fuelled by frontier spirit. It publishes deeply reported features from across the world.

Peter Carlyon is a staff writer at The Londoner. He has also written for Dispatch and The Fence magazines.

Daniele Morganti is a freelance illustrator and art director based in Milan. A former Mimaster student, his professional background includes over 10 years of experience in art direction for branding and digital products. When he’s not working, he collects pins, magazines, and fanzines wherever he can find them. You can see more of his work on Instagram.

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