The UK's Finest Independent Forum for Shooters and Gun Owners. Est 2010.

MistAgain wrote:The advert for the London Armoury Ltd was for the shop owned by George Staden

Correct

We only went once and found him to be very unfriendly. I needed a main spring for a Colt 32 Pocket Positive revolver and he admitted to having one but would not sell it to me as it was "a qualified gunsmiths job" to fit it.
Fred

George was notoriously grumpy, but it was a popular place to buy guns in the 80's.

I got my very first S&W 686 from there.

I went there in the late 80's specifically to buy a Glock, he put me right off with his seemingly patronising attitude as I knew little about them, so I ended up going to Maskell's guns on my way home and bought a Beretta 92F instead happy days eh as was .

pe4king wrote:I went there in the late 80's specifically to buy a Glock

Ah, I bought my Glock from Joe Beatham, at the Gunshop, in East Barnet.

I still have the receipt, dated 16/9/1996.

£300 secondhand, money well spent

I bought my first 1911 from the shop in Commercial Road . . . must have been about 1987. One of their rebuilds - new slide on a GI frame IIRC. That went the way of all pistols after the handgun ban. But I also bough one of the original Chrony chronographs their a couple of years later and still have it!

Happy memories.

Triffid

Hmm Smiling George!

I pxed a Steyr GB 9mm pistol for a Ruger Vaquero and a Uberti 1866 Yellowboy carbine both in 45colt.
Just got into cowboy action shooting about 1993/4.

When I was in the shop some eastern types came in with a list of ammo they were looking for.
Several thousand rounds of sporting stuff 375 H&H 416 Rigby etc
He gave them a price which I think he just made up on the spot.
Could they export it ? "Yeah no problem"

I think he made a pile of money from the compensation and lives some where warm.
I have some info about him somewhere.

Not much from Google about him, but looks like he's in Spain now...

George could certainly be grumpy , but at the same time he could go out of his way to help genuine shooters .

I can recall him at one of the Pistol AD meetings spending ages trying to sort out a problem gun that a new shooter had foolishly bought from a "sells guns once a year part time dealer"

From the mid 80's till the hand in , George was never out of the top 3 handgun sellers in the UK , and most of the time was No. 1 .

It was mostly thanks to George that we had a database of gun and accessory values when the hand in started as none of the associations was prepared to help create one .

I love reading stories like this, as the handgun ban was well before my time as a gun owner! Could you really get a Glock for under £400?!

It sounds like a lot of smaller gun shops went out of business as a result of the ban. Kinda feels like it shook every single aspect of the shooting community to the core. I can't imagine how bitter I'd have been, had I been a gun owner at the time...