Before & After Dorking

In addition to the ‘chocolate box’ hamlets and villages of the countryside, the project needs buildings that will represent the industrial and commercial powerhouse that was the Victorian Age.  These mostly brick-built structures are created from laser-etched panel kits designed and produced by  ‘ OSHIRO modelterrain’, supplemented by cast resin, 3D prints and scratch-built pieces as necessary. Unlike the half-timbered houses, these buildings have removable roofs for figures to be placed inside, as there are likely to be far too many individual buildings on the wargaming table to be able to track who is where. The  ‘ OSHIRO modelterrain’ products   are   self-assembly kits, many of which are catalogue items while some are bespoke designs. In creating a cohesive industrial or commercial site, various building kits are combined and then based on a MDF tile.  A completed tile that can represent a slaughterhouse, brewery, etc: And the various parts at early in ...

The  half-timbered house  is the  quintessential component of the  so-called ‘ Chocolate Box ’ English village. From medieval times onward, half -timbered houses have been a feature of the English rural and urban landscape. A timber-framed structure usually with an infill of wattle and daub, they are described as ‘half-timbered’ because they were constructed from split rather than whole logs.  In terms of outward appearance, other than the addition of glazing and guttering, such a house constructed in the  15thC  might by the 19thC appear largely unchanged.  Lavenham in Suffolk is considered to be England’s best preserved medieval village and the following images are from a research trip in early 2022: This project is accumulating medieval houses, which comprise resin casts from ‘ OSHIRO modelterrain’ combined   with scratch-built elements. The finished houses are fixed to A4 MDF tiles that can be laid out in a variety of combinations, a...