About Hobbies

Hobbies has been supplying model makers since 1895 and still trades from Norfolk, posting kits, balsa, paints and tools out to workshops and kitchen tables across the country.

Inside the catalogue

Model aircraft, boats and railways form the backbone of the range, with Airfix, Revell, Tamiya, Hornby, Occre, Cobi and Metal Earth all on the shelves and die-cast vehicles, military subjects and architectural kits alongside them. Behind the boxed kits sits the part that keeps modellers returning: sheet balsa and hardwood, wheels and axles, brass and plastic section, adhesives, decals, scenic materials, airbrushes, cutting tools and small-scale lighting. A craft side runs in parallel, covering dolls houses and their furniture, mosaics, jigsaw puzzles and needlecraft.

The Hobbies Handbook

The company's full-colour handbook is its signature publication, sold as a printed annual and readable online, and it works as a project book rather than a bare price list. That is why the pre-order listing for the coming edition tends to appear here each autumn. Anyone ordering plans and the timber to cut them from in a single basket has usually been sent there by the handbook in the first place.

Applying a Hobbies discount code

Put the kit and everything it needs into the basket, then open the basket page and look for the discount code box before you move through to the delivery step. Type the code in, apply it, and give the total a moment to redraw before going any further. The checkout will take one code at a time, and codes are commonly written out of gift vouchers and of the handbook itself. Where nothing at all happens on applying it, check first whether the offer was really a no-code deal advertised on the site rather than a code that has lapsed.

Delivery and where the savings are

Carriage falls away once an order clears the qualifying value shown on the delivery page, and stock items ordered in time go out on a next-working-day service, which matters when a build has stalled for want of one length of dowel. Orders are picked in Norfolk and the phone line is staffed on weekdays and Saturday mornings, handy for checking a scale or a fitting before committing. Clearance and end-of-line kits carry the deepest reductions on the site, and the seasonal sales cluster around Christmas, when kits move as presents.