I wouldn’t buy anything from here, even if the place was still fully up and running, let alone in its current zombie site state.
I think the probability that you pay them money to their website and not hear or receive anything, and then not be able to contact them is quite high. I mean it was a possibility, even when the shop was fully up and running, so now I think it’s a dead cert.
IMO TGM must have gone downhill from its alleged glory days way before I visited for the first time in 2014. Either that or it was always a dump run by someone who was massively narcissistic and not very nice. The aquariums didn’t look that great to me, and weren’t the best maintained tanks I’ve ever seen. Other than the tanks, it just looked like a messy storage container
I also had a run in with James the owner, who claimed to be the Merseyside Takashi Amano 🙄 and I experienced his brilliant customer service first hand.
This issue was due to James mis selling me tons of expensive seiryu stone, at a cost of hundreds of pounds. I feel he did this on purpose and took advantage of my naivety at the time to sell me far more than I needed. As it goes, almost the full volume of my tank in stone, even though James himself personally sold all of this stone to me knowing my tank dimensions, and allegedly knowing what he was doing with scaping. I was naive then and building my first scape, so I ate up this self professed masters words and let him take advantage of me and sell me far too much rock than would ever go in the tank that I had.
When I realised back home, I phoned up and spoke to James. He was very rude and dismissive, and said it was my issue (his words). He at one point in the conversation agreed to take the surplus back and give a store credit, then retracted this offer. He then proceeded to tell me I had been rude to him and hung up, and then refused to answer the phone when I phoned back or picking it up and leaving it on the side without speaking. Anyway, this all burst my bubble of looking up to James and I was stuck with lots of stone I couldn’t use. How pathetic, and embarrassing for an apparently world renowned professional aquascaper, and apparently successful businessman 🙄🙄🤷🏻♂️.
Then I discovered UKAPS and then Aquarium Gardens where the staff/ owners are true masters (as you can see by their display tanks), yet humble in that they don’t claim to be the British Amano. Never had a bad experience with AG.
With the above example of customer service, just think what it will be like when you buy a tank (that probably doesn’t exist) now that they are closed down.