Royal Armouries Museum

So they have been free, these 15, and it's 15 museums and museum groups.

And it includes all the London ones that you've heard of, but also the National Museums in Liverpool and the Science Museums in Manchester and elsewhere in the Royal Armouries in Leeds and Tate Galleries all over the country.

So it's not just a London thing, but there are 15 museums museum groups that are sponsored by DCMS and they have been free since 2001 some of them like the British Museum have always been free and actually the British Museum when it was founded the Act of Parliament that established it they talked about how it should be free for all curious and studious minds I think I think is the phrase.

And every so often, and this has happened before, somebody points out that Brits have to pay to go to see the Mona Lisa in the Louvre or, you know, the Sistine Chapel or whatever.

The next one is Fiasco on October the 25th, 2026.

So we're taking a bit of a jump, starting at 10 o'clock, located at the Royal Armouries Museum in Yorkshire and Humber.

Sounds like a cool place to play.

Yeah.

And some of the bullets did go right through him and broke the back of the chair.

And the chair is still in the collection of the Royal Armouries today.

And it's really curious, the more recent you get in time, the more horrific, tragic, overwhelming these events seem to be.

And it's kind of weird and it's kind of unfortunate because it has meant that the beheadings of the past, like Anne Boleyn and Catherine Howard, have been treated with more levity, less sensitivity because it happened such a long time ago.

in europe it started with finnish and then links picked up and then you had viking which was recent um i think i'd love to have a british brutality like that would be cool brutality or something silly like that The problem is most of the guns will have to be stage guns.

Yeah, get the Royal Armouries to sponsor it.

Yeah, that'd be hilarious.

Bring out a bunch of things.

Moving on to October, Andy Dickinson, my first ever guest, is running Fiasco, which is the big Leeds Wargames con.

Runs from 10 till 3 at the Royal Armouries in Leeds.

There's a fiver on the door, there's a free Battletech event, and he will have the Lawscape Kickstarter terrain to drool over.

Periphery Assault 2026, the first of the 2026 Alpha Strike tournaments, is going to be in Peterborough, as ever.

And instead, her book shows how Mongols built one of the world's great and most dynamic and interconnected empires.

I wanted to talk to Marie about a new show at the Royal Armouries in Leeds that she's curated, which is on Genghis Khan and the Mongol world.

And rather than simply telling the story of conquest, the exhibition explores the people, the ideas, technologies, and global connections that transformed Eurasia in the 13th and 14th centuries.

So today we're going to talk about how to separate myth from reality, to think about the legacies of the Mongols, why they're understood in the way that they are, and ask what made them so extraordinary and why their story still matters today.

Most of these collections come from 13th, 14th centuries, and they come directly from excavations.

So this is also like research alive that we can see here for the first time.

So in Royal Armouries Leeds Museum.

And the topic is the Mongol Empire, of course.

I established a studio to actually reconstruct and then later restore armor and edged weapons, and as time went on, I began doing more and more restoration.

And my scholastic approach to the work, uh, was rewarded with me being, um, granted the position of master armorer to the Royal Armouries at the Royal Armouries Museum in Leeds.

I did a stint there.

Um, but I've been working in, around, and for museums for about 40 years now in, in the field initially of applied arts, working with arms and armor, and then I moved into graphic art, paintings, and then sculpture, and even architecture.