So Saturday morning found me on the train from London heading up to Birmingham to check out  the UK’s newest video rental store, well sadly one that was only going to open for 4-days. And it was that exact reason, its short life span, that made me want to going and check it out for myself.

The other deciding factor was that it was being put together by the King Of Video himself, the always amazing @VivaVHS, yes the one man champion of video, Dale, was creating his own video rental store for one weekend only, in conjunction with Scalarama, DVD Bang and the Flatpack Film Festival, so a meeting of great minds.

A short walk from the station found me walking straight into the wrong building which was a typical bad start for a day out, but I soon found the right and you know what? It was so great. Dale had done such a good job of putting the place together, there was a huge selection of his own personal tapes to browse through, all set our rental store style. Plus they had tapes for sale, which is a rare thing to see now as video tapes seem to have nearly all vanished from any shops , also there was a huge projector screen playing tapes and several smaller TVs you could watch tapes on as well.

Dale is one of the friendliest guys you can meet and seemed to be totally in his element welcoming people who were dropping in, showing them around and being the best possible champion for the VHS format.

For me it was simply great to loose myself in browsing the tapes, and for a short while I could remember what it was like back in the day when you could spend hours scouring the shelves of video stores looking for something tempting, interesting and unknown.

It was a so worth going up there for the day just to be around all those amazing tapes and films, I also picked up a big haul of VHS as well from the sales tables, we’ll be using those later in the year for one of our DukeFest events. I’d love to be able to put on an event like this in London, so maybe one day we’ll bring the Video Palace to London and throw in some special Duke events as well, it could well happen!

And here’s my VHS haul from the Video Palace