Once again I made the annual pilgrimage to the IPMS Barnet show held at the fascinating RAF Museum located in Hendon, North London.
This is my 3rd time at this popular show and I wasn’t disappointed. Upon arrival, we were kindly directed into the car parking area where it is clearly marked as a Pay and Display, charging a small fee of £3.50 all day parking or £2.50 for 6 hours, common sense prevailed and I bought an all day ticket!
Going into the museum in the Milestones of Flight hall, there were several tables on the upper and lower sections, including the Airfix Special Interest Group (SIG) and Britmodeller, who unfortunately had a few incidents with children getting too familiar with their display, resulting in a few damaged planes. This was, apparently, the only incident in which models were damaged.
Again, lighting was poor in some areas of the museum, but not so bad as to put a downer on things. The tables were spread evenly around various of the beautiful artefacts on display, but I can only feel for visitors wishing to take a picture of an aircraft as they had to do so with a table of models in front of it! I guess it’s hard to avoid this layout if a museum is chosen for the model show.
The trading hall was again located in the Dermot Boyle wing and was rather snug in some parts, and I for one was getting quite frustrated getting barged and pushed all over by over zealous bargain hunters. I think more planning is needed to prevent this from happening again as the busier areas were dominated by the more popular stalls. I.e. Little Cars, MDC and SMN!
The competition area is a joy to behold, very well lit with natural light flooding the room and ample manoeuvring room around the tables. If only the tables were as high as the Lincoln/Newark competition tables, then it would be perfect!
Overall, I had a great day at this show and it was only marred by the close proximity of the modelling tables to the exhibits and the claustrophobic trading hall. Congratulations to all those involved in putting on this extremely well organised modelling event.
Adam B.
