The Red City has its origins way back before it was eventually assembled. I was blown away by the City Fight WH40k codex published in 2001. I loved the idea of fighting games inside a large city (whether in rubble or not) and started to gather suitable material to build one. The model cities in the book were pretty well all scratch built, although a biscuit foam ruined building was released to accompany the book.
I don't know when the designers at Games Workshop first got it into their heads to create a modular plastic building set, but City Fight must have been part of the inspirational process.
The first sets were released in June 2006 to accompany City Fight version two, 'Cities Of Death'. I immediately started buying them with a view to creating a city scape of my own for my 40k games at home.
In addition to the sets I was buying and stashing away however, I sourced a number of sprues of a slightly different nature. I found out that the first attempt at making the modular building sprues had involved a Chinese manufacturer. Apparently the powers that be were not happy with the sample product that reached Nottingham and they decided to redesign and manufacture the final product here in the UK. I acquired a number of these from a former staff member who had been allowed to keep some of them.
They were of a simpler design (same basic dimensions) than the sprues that eventually went into widespread production and apart from being a curio, they were not particularly attractive. They were not as detailed and the details were a lot 'softer'. From my point of view however, they were relatively cheap building bricks for the imagined project. So they joined the rest awaiting the 'big build'! I knew I needed a lot of sprues to build a city and my budget was far from unlimited, so cheaper options were very welcome.
I deliberately kept some parts removable as they could be used on different buildings etc.
Over the next few years, I added other nice looking bits and pieces and a couple of the 'Planet strike' bastions. I eventually had a very large box full of grey plastic awaiting inspiration and time to put them altogether and realise my dream.
It was not to be until 2015 that I finally found the time and inspiration to address the challenge. The question was how to make the end result different from the 'stand alone' GW buildings. At the time I was hoping to play a lot more skirmish based games like Necromunda and it was here that I found the design idea that led the project.
I decided that I wanted the buildings to be whole and undamaged (a major decision) but more importantly I wanted them to be connected by walkways above ground. I wanted the walkways to be capable of crossing over each other at different levels. This would give scope for models to be shooting down/up at each other and make the games less linear.
I played around with ideas and came up with a fairly simple but relatively robust solution as shown in the accompanying photos. The basic floor pieces could be joined together with the small wall strips and then have pieces of girder sticking out which could slide over and underneath other floor pieces attached to buildings. This 'sandwiching ' method meant they were not permanently attached and could be swapped around and even lengthened by joining two together in the middle with other plain floor pieces.
This method is pretty robust and if there is a piece which becomes detached or breaks off, glue soon fixes it.
With this problem solved I set about creating 'tower' like structures to act as the lynchpins around which the walkway web could be woven.
Once I had created these free standing towers, I was able to concentrate on some more substantial buildings which were meant to be for different purposes. In most cases I gave them a link to the walkway web, but some structures remain completely self contained.
Some of the buildings were designed to be ecclesiastical or administrative or belonging to the Adeptus Mechanicum. Flexibility is however the key word with the whole collection. The two Planet Strike bunkers, I imagined as a security headquarters and outpost or defense hub etc.
Once I had built the main buildings, I decided to make some smaller buildings to block line of sight and help to make the city feel more crowded. These four sided buildings all have items on their roof like a loud hailer system, a camera, religious symbol etc.
Finally I moved onto creating some simple 'industrial' terrain pieces to further fill the city at ground level but with more elevated walkways. These structures are mostly made from empty tin cans (the coffee powder type are excellent) with elements of plastic terrain sets added like pipes, tubes, ladders etc. I also created some movable gantry ways to link these together. These came from some GW kits, but mainly from the original Necromunda game. I had gathered together a lot of the plastic building frame pieces used to hold cardboard scenery together in Necromunda.
Not shown in any of the photos is quite a large amount of scatter terrain in the form of low armoured barriers, cargo crates etc.
A shot from a 54mm scale game. The City is really quite adaptable vis a vis scale.
By the time all of this had been built I was exhausted by the process and almost addicted to the glue fumes! I made a final search in my dragons hoard for more pieces that would fit in and found a couple of resin columns to which I added a statue and communications rig. I was done! I had completed the project and used up all of the material I had been gathering together over the previous 10 years.
But Graham I hear you say, you haven't painted it! Correct I hadn't put a single lick of paint anywhere but it was such a large project I just didn't know where to start. I wanted to start using the city and don't play with unpainted models or terrain pieces, so a solution had to be found.
My 'temporary' solution was rattle cans. I don't own a working airbrush but I did have a lot of spray cans and could buy more. So on one sunny day a week later, the ground of Apperley Towers were almost hidden by clouds of brown, bronze and gun metal spray paint. It took quite a while even so and the smell lingered for days, but the city wasn't just grey plastic, it was now a reddy.. browny,.... bronzey colour and the 'Red City' was born! It was always my intention to come back to the project and finish the paint job by brush. I somehow doubt that will ever happen now, but a subsequent owner in the future could always take up the challenge. My only real regret is that its seen so little use for games and takes up a huge amount of storage space. It just about fits into two of the largest 'really useful' boxes.
I have actually got far more use out of my ruined city collection, but that's a tale for another day!
Tara a bit!
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