These be heady and overly-excitable times for the professional model-making fraternity hereabouts.
The eyes, ears, noses, throats and index fingers of the entire actual factual model-making world are currently trained, cocked and pointed in the direction of the Midlands.
Local model-makers, myself included naturally, have been responsible for some cutting edge scale models in recent months – my model of Birmingham’s extensive canal network (there’s more than in actual factual Venice), complete with wet bits, has been shortlisted for an international award.
This summer WORDSCAMP will come to the Midlands thanks solely to myself being so brilliant and stuff.
Now, we hear that one of our local model-making suppliers of equipment, toolage and clothing has been named Best Retailer in the World Ever (for now) by the international brotherhood of professional model-makers.
Tito Bassoon’s Specialist Supplies & Gentleman’s Outfitters – known to all and sundry and some others we don’t care to mention as plain old Tito’s, or The Best Little Warehouse in Tyseley – is richly deserving of this accolade and it is another feather in the model-making cap of the Midlands.
The premises is surprisingly large, mainly because it extends underground for about a mile and a half.
From the outside it looks a bit like a shed would, tucked away behind other industrial units.
The outside, yesterday:
But inside, it is a lad’s cave of model-making delights with shelf upon stacked shelf and row upon parallel row of all sorts of treasures of delight and everything.
The inside, yesterday:
Tito is the fifth generation Bassoon to run the warehouse and although he has modernised slightly, it is still a throwback to a bygone age when men were simpler and cars were slower.
As well as some up-”to”-the-minute and state-”of”-the-art equipment, some of the swellings are simply to die for and any style-conscious model-maker would want to be seen parading through his studio-cum-workshop in them.
But it is the older toolage and machinery that really tends to excite and delight and which earned Tito and his team this prestigious award.
Here’s a big, bumper bag of quimquacks (tiny pin-headed ironwork used for a variety of purposes on many models), yesterday:
And this is one of Tito’s prized machines, so much so that he refuses to sell it. A Screaming Jackson, at rest, yesterday:
Truly a landmark building for Birmingham, the wider Midlands economic region and the entire actual factual professional model-making world.
It should, by rights, ranks alongside the Rotunda, the Selfishness building in the Bullring and Fort Dunlop as being really quite nice.
We should all be prouder than a punch-drunk puppeteer.
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