Many thanks to you all for your thoughts and advice. More particularly thankyou to Jake at Vitas, he kindly supplied me with a low grade f18 made in the Robertsbridge workshop. An amazing bat for the price. Definitely a good sign for the custom bat I will be getting through Jake from GN UK later in the summer.
Jake was a pleasure to deal with and I have to say without hesitation my best experience of buying from a cricket shop. I have enjoyed buying from batmakers in the past, but other than Meulemans in Perth have found buying from cricket shops a hollow experience. By contrast I found Jake thorough, interested, responsive, knowledgeable both in a practical sense from his playing cricket and in a technical knowledge of his products, and enthusiastic. Definitely I would recommend him highly to all.
The only other thing is, I think it sad that GN don't make more of their Robertsbridge heritage and abilities. By contrast to Australia GN, which is proud of its bat maker and the bats it makes, make some unique and incredible quality bats, in the UK I would think it would be great to have a range of bats its makes by hand in the Robertsbridge workshop, and make the most of their clearly talented batmaker. Anyhow only one mans thoughts.