Brad Pitt in Troy. Paul Mescal in Gladiator II. Henry Cavill in The Witcher. This is not just a list of leading men playing fearsome warriors (or our dream dinner-party guests). It is a roll call of characters whose armour was made by Norton Armouries, a workshop on the Eastnor Estate that could not feel further from the sun-scorched deserts or mud-lashed forests its armour is destined for.
For starters, arriving there feels like a fairytale – driving past Eastnor Castle and up a narrow, hedge-lined lane to a collection of red-brick, beamed cottages surrounded by blossom-covered trees and hazy, horse-filled fields. And then, the workshop. A quaint former barn that could be a farm – apart from the fact that it is barricaded in by hundreds of boxes of armour, freshly returned to Herefordshire from a Hollywood film set.
The company has been making armour for film and TV since it started in 2000, when the team made the armour for Ridley Scott’s Gladiator. Since then, it has turned out thousands of suits of armour for pretty much every battle-heavy production you can think of: Game of Thrones, Dune, The Witcher, Lord of the Rings: Rings of Power, Troy, The Odyssey…
‘Predominantly, medieval is our niche. But we also do a lot of fantasy stuff: Roman, Greek, sci-fi. We have a massive barn full of armour.’ I’m talking to Hannah, Norton Armouries’ hire manager, in its upstairs office. It is unlike any office I have ever been in. The walls are plastered with breastplates, helmets and pictures of famous characters wearing armour made here. Mannequins loom like armoured ghosts in every corner, including a White Walker from Game of Thrones. Even Hannah’s desk has a large, half-painted shield next to her computer.
‘Our main work is TV and film. A lot of our stuff here has been on screen. This one was for A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms,’ she says, gesturing towards the apple-embossed bronze armour worn by Edward Ashley as knight Steffon Fossoway in the show. ‘We sculpted all these apples by hand.’
You’d think it’d take, well, an army to produce this scale of armour. But Norton Armouries is a small operation: everything begins in rooms barely bigger than a garage, each piece passing through the same six pairs of hands. Production companies either commission bespoke designs or, increasingly, hire armour, drawing from the vast and ever-growing archive stored across the estate. What began as a workshop making breastplates and shields for Gladiator has grown into something closer to a real-life armoury of battle-ready costumes.
The team is helmed by soon-to-be husband-and-wife duo Hannah, who manages the for-hire side of the business, and Jarrod, who manages pretty much everything else. Jarrod started as a workshop assistant, expecting to be here for a short stint. Years later, he is still here, now overseeing almost every stage of the process – from casting to finishing – with the easy familiarity of someone who knows every mould in the building.
‘We have hundreds and hundreds of moulds of different historical pieces, and have made hundreds and hundreds of sets,’ says Jarrod. ‘We often work on two or three shows at the same time, so we might be making 200 sets for one production and 200 for another.’
Jarrod takes me into the series of workshops – low-ceilinged, damp rooms filled with moulds and huge stations where the armour is shaped by tools that, themselves, sound like weapons: a shock blaster, a paint gun, a spray caster.
Each piece follows a precise process. A mould – sometimes drawn from the archives, other times based on a 3D scan of an actor’s body – is cast in polyurethane, pulled while still warm, then sanded down until it mimics the thickness of metal. From there it is blasted, painted, masked and reworked – every scratch, dent and patina added by hand until it carries the illusion of age. Other pieces, like shields, are painted by hand in another workshop fitted with dripping paint tins and spray guns, manned by a small squadron of painters.
‘This is the unglamorous side of the film industry,’ jokes Jarrod, showing me his spray casting station that has excess polyurethane spooling from the ceiling like silver stalactites. Another wall has phone numbers scrawled on it in Sharpie – owner Jon’s way of keeping an address book in the business’s early days.
Thankfully, the digital side of things has advanced since then; the team proudly tell me how they’re number one in Google and AI searches for costumer armourers. But the main appeal of the business is still its physicality. Productions still want something real – something that catches the light properly, that moves as it should – even as the rest of the scene is built digitally.
And everything really is made by hand here, in a tiny workshop on the Eastnor Estate where global productions and rural life fold into one another without much fuss. And, really, where else could an armoury like this exist other than next to Eastnor Castle?