One does not simply walk into Mordor Wakefield. It’s better to go by car or train.
This year’s Wakefield Show will be taking place on 16th April, which is now just over two weeks away. The show will take place in the combined Cypress, Hawthorne and Oak Suites of its usual venue, the rather nice – and very easy to find – Cedar Court Hotel, which is a stone’s throw from junction 39 of the M1, so readily accessible by car.
For those coming in by train, the club has arranged for a free minibus service running between the hotel and Wakefield Westgate railway station – and if you’d rather catch a bus, the hotel is well served by local public buses.
The full address of the hotel is:
Denby Dale Road
Calder Grove,
Wakefield,
WF4 3QZ
Full travel and accommodation details are provided on the show website – where a ‘KMZ’ file can also be found by those who would like to see the location in mapping software that can cope with such files. KMZ files are zipped versions of ‘KML’ files – and RiscOSM can read those.
If you want to spend all day at the show (as some do) then you need to start queueing up to get in by 10:30AM, which is when the doors are open to the public, and you’ll find yourself being kicked out at around 4:30PM. That works out at six hours of the Wakefield Show, and with entry costing a mere £5.00 that’s less than a quid an hour if you do stay the whole day – and that fiver also gets you entry into a prize draw to be held at the show.
At the latest count, there are more than twenty exhibitors lined up for what the Wakefield RISC OS Computer Club calls “the platform’s premier event in the North” – though to be fair, their only real competition for that claim are user group meetings!
As is customary, there will be a room set aside for the ‘Show Theatre’ with the current provisional list of presentations to be given by R-Comp, RISC OS Open Ltd, CJE Micro’s, Sine Nomine, and MW Software.
For the observant amongst you, yes: that means Martin Würthner is on the list of exhibitors for this year’s show – he was unforunately not present last year. The full list of exhibitors can be found on the show website – and could very well expand as the show grows ever nearer – but currently, as well as Martin, it includes big names such as RISC OS Open, R-Comp, and CJE Micro’s, as well as smaller developers such as Sine Nomine, Soft Rock Software, and AmCog Games. There will also be a contingent of exhibitors for fans of retro and 8-bit platforms, such as A Bug, Retro Hardware and Flax Cottage.
And, of course, there will be a charity stand, raising money for the local Wakefield Hospice – as supported by the show to the tune of over £17,000 to date.
