The End Times Strike The First Ever Games Workshop Store!
February 13, 2015 by brennon
Ian Livingstone, a stalwart of Games Workshop in times gone by, has been lamenting the fall of the first ever Games Workshop store as it's going to be demolished soon.
The store was opened back in 1978 down in London and as you can see had people queuing round the corner to get inside and pick up the latest from Dungeons & Dragons and more. Ian Livingstone and Steve Jackson (who incidentally is an alumni of my university!) set up Games Workshop with their friend John Peake back in 1975 and they've bought so much to the hobby since then.
As you can see it looks just as packed with stuff as a Games Workshop nowadays but with a few more extra systems on the shelves. It must have been great in those early days having a place where people could come and talk about their hobby AND pick up the latest stuff too.
This is what the store looks like now, a far cry from its days as a hobby beacon down in London. This year also marks the 40th anniversary of Games Workshop and it seems somewhat apt for this year to mark the close of the first store and the opening of the new Warhammer World later this year.
It's certainly a far cry from those days on the mean streets of Hammersmith (what a good place for the store) but hopefully it will be a really interesting new venue to visit with the addition of the Forge World and Black Library stores too.
Maybe we have some members of the site who remember the first store?
"The store was opened back in 1978 down in London and as you can see had people queuing round the corner to get inside and pick up the latest from Dungeons & Dragons and more."
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"This year also marks the 40th anniversary of Games Workshop and it seems somewhat apt for this year to mark the close of the first store"
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I was at Ian & Steve’s seminar at Dragonmeet in December where they mentioned they were looking to recreate the top photo with as many people who were there as possible.
Well its ok really because according to GW themselves they are no longer a retailer .
But this is sad because it was in the good old days. Before it went all corporate, when there was a “rawness” to GW, but that rawness made it FUN!
As an analogy; the company “felt” like the Traveller cartoons from early White Dwarfs (raw, edgy and quirky), now it’s become like the magazines a 4 year old likes: no content, glossy and with plastic crap on the front to make them want to buy it
Ah well onwards and upwards
Thumbs up for the Traveller mention. I have a lot of early Dwarf and that was my favourite strip.
Rescue “The Prisoner” was inspired.
@brianparker you might enjoy this then
http://www.2000ad.org/markus/travellers/
Oh I missed the no longer a retailer thing – so not a retailer, not a games company and the self-title of best miniatures company in the world is looking shaky – wonder what they are now then?
And kids, back in the olden days if you wanted any miniatures, you had to ask a member of staff to get them from the drawers behind the counter. No fancy multi-mini blisters hanging on racks.
I wonder what happened to John Peake
He wasn’t into roleplaying so when Steve & Ian took the company in that direction he left. After that I’ve no idea.
This is end of an era.
I visited the shop in 1981 and 1984 – this is the one in Hammersmith right? I have vague memories of someone with a beard and there was a guy painting minis in the shop.
The photo of the queue has made me realise one thing.
Gamers waistlines have expanded since the 1970’s…. 🙂
Yep this is the Hammersmith store 🙂
We couldn’t afford food back then. We just ate cardboard.
Spent many a happy hour browsing in there when they only had half a dozen games to their name. Still have my copies of Warlock of Firetop Mountain and Valley of the Four Winds. They also sold a lovely range of SF and Fantasy jigsaws!
Warlock was highly underated game s was warrior knights
Admittedly the first time I heard the names Ian Livingstone and Steve Jackson was through their “Choose your own adventure” books.I’d hunt libraries for them and borrow as many as I could.
I have quite fond memories of the GW store here in Hamburg from when I was young. I was about 11 years, so this is from the early 90s. It was so much fun to be in that store, talking to people, spending your allowance on that one mini you like and directly starting to build and paint it right there in the store.
Something changed over the years. If its me or the store I might not say, maybe a bit of both.
I was there, mainly buying the Traveller little black books in those days. They’re still here on a shelf. No game with hexadecimal stats is leaving this house!
I remember heading down there, I bought my first ever mini in there.
I was 10 when I went to Darling road in 1978 and spent many, many years going there as it was only 20 minutes or so from my house.
I joined GW in the early 90’s and became the last manager of the Darling road store before they closed it. Many things in the GW museum were taken to nottingham museum from there, not all on display to this day.
Dalling Road, not Darling.
I really wish it were still like this, with a multitude of specialist games and games from other companies, surely diversification was a better way for them? Who knows, they’re still in business.