Napoleonic Association

How to book us

What can Napoleonic Association bring to your event?

Consider the excitement of the Battle of Waterloo, the Age of Elegance, Georgian England and Revolutionary France. Redcoats, Canons and the Dashing colourful uniforms of mounted cavalry. Think of the times of Jane Austen, and TV-series and movies like Sanditon, Bridgerton, Napoleon, Sharpe and his Rifles. 

The interest in this period could not be higher at this time with record numbers of Film and TV drama in the media some of which have contributions from our members. 

The Napoleonic Association members portray the life of the soldiers and military wives and families of the period known as the Napoleonic Wars. This includes British, French and other European soldiers who fought in campaigns with Napoleon and Wellington through Spain and Portugal through to the famous Battle of Waterloo. 

We are a facility-orientated group and have displays to excite and entertain every member of the family with hands-on living history, muskets, cannon and horses. The Napoleonic Association has the expertise and exceptional events staff to make your great event spectacular. 

Our members will bring history to life for your visitors with authentic tents, cooking on fires (raised risk-assessed fire pits) and give a Birds Eye view of the sights and sounds of a bustling military camp. 

To help you plan your event, and for us to give you 100% of what we offer, we will need to consider the following:

  • Camping space and suitability — depending on how many tents we need to bring will to govern the space needed. We can give you a football pitch size of living history with extra space between tents for people in wheelchairs, or parents with pushchairs. The ground will need to be suitable for putting in 9-12″ pegs, and not prone to standing water or flooding.
  • Arena space — to perform battle displays we need a marked arena, usually a double barrier (rope, tape or fence) (supplied) with the distance between the inner and outer rope/barrier being at least 2m apart. This allows us to comply with our risk assessments. 
  • Water, lavatories and Wood — this may seem obvious, but we need 24-hour access to fresh drinking water, lavatory facilities, and if overnight camping is expected, firewood. These are NOT included in any price quoted and must be provided by the sponsor. If hiring portaloos for multi-day events, you need to take into account that participants will be using them overnight when calculating numbers for the re-enactors and your visitors.
  • Event scheduling — we will discuss exactly what displays or arena events we will be able to perform, but usually in a 6-hour event day we provide separate displays as well as a full battle scenario. In between we offer hands-on living history and small vignettes as well as visual displays of living history. The exact program can be discussed at length with you prior to your booking with us.
  • Site and vehicle access — we need drivable access to the camping area to unload and load our equipment. Setups for larger events are usually done on the days preceding the event, so we will need unrestricted access to the camping area during this time. On the event day, we are happy to remove vehicles from the event area but will need access the moment the event closes to the public (particularly for emergencies in the evenings when the event is closed).
  • We will almost always require a site visit with new clients to assess the event area, and discuss details. This is to ensure that we discuss and agree on Health And Safety protocols including the risk assessments that we have for all of our activities. 
  • We provide an events team to run the event for the entire weekend. All the members of the team are volunteers and the Napoleonic Association is a non-profit making organisation. We charge only for the actual costs of consumables and transport which is for gunpowder and transportation costs as well as the site visits. 
  • We are one of the most cost-effective event spectacle providers in the UK and we are the biggest Napoleonic reenactment group in the world

To discuss your needs in detail:

What happens next?

If you like the sound of us then the next step is that we chat on the phone or in
person and work out some of the details above and of course… a date.

When you contact us, we will give you our availability for the year. We try to slot in around school holidays and special days such as Father’s Day etc. We also have repeat bookers so we try to have one event per month between May and October.

Our prices are always negotiable as we want our relationship to grow and everyone to succeed from the event. We can provide testimonials from our last year’s venues. We will always ask for a deposit to cover initial visits but always offset this against a future booking in the event of an unavoidable cancellation, such as parched grass or a dreadful storm. Please note that our members turn up in the pouring rain.

To quote Sharpe: ”3 shots a minute in any weather”.

We have a fully inclusive policy and have women who will accurately portray male soldiers and we actively encourage inclusion and diversity despite history having somewhat different views. We are environmentally friendly. Whereas we welcome some waste disposal facilities from venues, we encourage our members to remove their own rubbish to their home recycling systems. 

Ash from our firepits is usually welcomed in the gardens of the places we visit. We aim to leave a zero trace footprint.

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