The interior design of Warhammer World is an amazing sight. Huge walls and ramparts, real flagstones on the floor, it is definitely a must see! Having just taken part in the Cry Havoc Open Day it seemed like a great idea to talk to the Perry twins and Dave Andrews to find out more about how it was made. This gave me a chance to play roving reporter and dodge out of doing some work for a few hours. My thanks to Mark Chambers who supplied me with some extra details (interspersed in the interview) and some great photographs showing the hall take shape.

Adi: So, how did you get involved in the Warhammer World Events hall project?
Michael: Rick (Priestley) originally suggested it at a party.
Alan: Well, I suppose it was Tom Kirby really.
Dave: They'd wanted to do something with the Events hall for a while. They had a real architect to do some preliminary drawings. The plans just looked too new, too clean and modern day. Mock Tudor I suppose.
Alan: Not even mock Tudor, more like mock 1950s! The sketches had garages, brick walls...
Adi: So you ended up with something pretty bad then. Not what people expected.
Michael: No, worse than we expected!

Warhammer World shop

Mark Chambers: I got a group of people together in a room (Alan Merrett, Nick Cristofoli, Stuart Martin and Prince) and said, "If we could do anything with the store and money was not a problem what would we do?". I then went on the road and looked at lots of castles and museums and met with some builders who came up with the store concept (which we eventually used in its entirety!).

Adi: So you were asked to get involved, what did you do then?
Dave: We started off by sketching out some rough drawings. Alan Merrett came up with a few himself.
Alan: We didn't even know the dimensions of the hall. We weren't bothered about details like that, just about getting a feel for the place.
Michael: Then we cut up the drawings and made a complete three dimensional model. This was taken into a meeting and everyone said WOW! Even though they were impressed they asked us to have another go.
Dave: They wanted the whole design toned down.
Dave: All we ended up doing was making another mock-up of the hall.
Alan: This time we used the actual dimensions of the hall.
Michael: They much preferred the new version.
Alan: Actually, we didn't even tone it down, they liked it anyway.

Mark: With these plans I went to the Board of Directors and Tom Kirby said that although the ideas were good he wanted the hall reconstructing as well! He wanted it to have a medieval look because 'people understand medieval'! So with this in mind I visited more castles (touching lots of walls and making lots of notes!). I then approached the builders again who came up with a plan to have a castle store front, a chapel car park wall, a castle production wall and a themed Bugman's Bar entrance, including a stage and tower.

Michael: We thought they would give the mock-up to a professional architect, someone to draw up a set of proper plans. I went away on holiday for a week and when I came back, they'd already started construction!
Adi: Who built it?
Alan: Roy Ball, John Berrisford and their team of 26 builders took the mock-up and used it as finished drawings. They took everything off those. I have to say it worked well though.
Michael: They started to come to us with questions about the designs as they went along.
Alan: They wanted our involvement at every level. They were very specific and took into account every detail. Right down to the type of nails to use, the texture of the walls...

Mark: The Perrys and Dave Andrews were exceptional consultants during construction making sure that all the details were what we wanted, from rendering of stone ("You need murder holes here and those battlements are too small, etc.") to what fittings to use!

You can see photographs of Warhammer World taken during construction below. Click on each to see a larger version.

Adi: How long did it take to build?
Alan: About 18 weeks.
Michael: It must have been 6 weeks on the shop alone.
Dave: They started on that first.
Adi: I noticed a couple of huge arches in the hall.
Michael: Oh, they were to hide the girders that held up the roof!
Adi: Great! I love the ivy.
Michael: Yes, but I would prefer to see much more of it.
Alan: Maybe we can add some more, more on the tops of the walls.
Dave: They're talking about making proper medieval-style furniture. That would be nice.
Alan: Yes, normal seating and tables doesn't look right at all in there.
Adi: How much actual hands-on work did you do? Anything?
Michael: Oh, loads of it, about 60-70% of the finished painting. The gargoyles were specially made.

Click on the gargoyles to see a larger version. The first two gargoyles are based on builder Roy Ball and Mark Chambers.

Alan: Michael and I made the gargoyles.
Michael: Dave painted the Eagle.
Alan: Michael painted the comet frieze above the staircase door.
Dave: What did you do Alan, you're just lazy...
Alan: I painted one of the walls, as all three of us did most of the time!
Adi: How did you do that? Hey, that's a silly question!
Alan: Oh, we used an industrial spray gun.
Alan: We used an ink wash type effect.
Dave: Just like when making a model building. Put on the ink, wipe it off, a model painting method.

Mark: When trying to render the fortress wall the builders used a huge tower to get to the higher parts of the walls and no matter what they tried they couldn't get up the wall. They went over to the Perrys and said "There's something wrong with the wall... we can't get up it!" to which the reply was "Of course, it's a battlement we don't want you scaling the walls (duh!)".

Adi: Did you do much on the shop?
Alan: No, the shop involved a very different set of criteria, very functional.
Dave: Not like the hall at all. We didn't design that anyway.
Michael: Have we got any funny anecdotes?
Alan: There was this German customer who had a look around one day...
Michael: Are you sure it wasn't an American?
Alan: I thought it was a German. Anyway he thought we'd used real stone for the wall!
Dave: It was plaster actually. Put on the walls and then cut into flag stone shapes.
Alan: A security guard saw unpainted walls one week, then painted walls the next and thought that we had a damp problem!
Dave: All the green staining we'd painted on...

Mark: Attention to detail was so important for the Perrys that they have even stuck a cat (a very realistic cat) to Bugman's roof!!

Michael: We used something like 180 tonnes of materials, 98 tonnes of flagstones on the floor. Mark Chambers could give you some exact numbers...

Adi: Would you like to have a go at doing something like this again?
Alan: We'd definitely do it again!
Dave: Yes, in any country you like.
Michael: Preferably overseas!

After all that, here are some photographs of the finished hall:

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