Hackspace wasn't that great last time I went. They have very little in the way of decent machine tools, mostly it's a place for 3D printing and little electronics projects. Worth a look, but not really good enough for mechanically-focused projects like ours. As for nearby events, yeah the north is pretty shafted when it comes to live events. Robots Live Grantham is the next-closest as Ocracoke said, then there's the FW champs in Birmingham late this summer. I don't know if there's anything we can do to entice XR and RL to come up a bit further North, maybe we can pitch in together, buy an etek and dangle it on a string somewhere up near Newcastle.