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Revision information, 21 November 2024 |
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Publisher: Brighton Toy and Model Museum, UK Editor: Eric Baird 9,865 Pages 11,896 Images and other files 70,107 edits since 2011-02 |
1860: "New-Year's Gifts: The Toyshop", by Mason Jackson [image info]
The Brighton Toy and Model Index
The Brighton Toy and Model Index is a regularly-updated knowledgebase for toys and models, and the general and social history of modelmaking and toymaking across the UK and Europe, from the industrial revolution to the middle of the Twentieth Century.
As of January 2024, the Index currently holds over nine thousand pages and over eleven thousand photographs and archive scans.
The rate of accumulation of new material has slowed a bit recently as the Museum directs more resources into refreshing its inventory. Recent changes in the museum itself have included rebuilding the aviation cabinet to include Skybirds and Britains Aircraft collections, and the new pre-War Dinky display includes an incredible collection of rare pre-war Dinky Aircraft from the 1930s. To reflect this, we've been acquiring contemporary material on early aviation to put onto the Index to support these collections. We're also starting to tentatively accumulate some material on the 1960s Apollo space programme, to be ready for Humankind's expected return to the Moon in 2025.
We've also now got our hands on an expanded collection of Budgie Toys and earlier Morestone diecast vehicles (Morestone rebranded and redistributed pieces from a range of little companies in North London before inventing the Budgie brand). So that's another subject area that we are expanding.
Although this encyclopaedia is powered by the same software that runs Wikipedia and (like Wikipedia), is a continually-growing "work in progress", editing is reserved for authorised Museum personnel.
The Early Toy Record
- The early history of toys provides a unique historical record of not only social and technological progress, but also of the collective psyche. Long before modern precision injection moulding and computer-generated tooling, early toys, made using comparatively crude processes, were by necessity highly impressionistic and somewhat abstract.
- The early "tinplate wranglers" were not just craftsman and engineers, but artists, striving to distil out the essential feel, identity and character of the originals in objects that might sometimes only have had a passing resemblance to their true proportions and shape. Early toy design was to some extent a form of three-dimensional cartooning or caricature, focussing on and emphasising a thing’s key identifying elements and discarding “unimportant” detail, the result being a slightly surreal and "dreamlike" record not of a thing’s physical shape, but of how it was understood and remembered.
- The result is a very human record of how humans saw, perceived and felt towards their surroundings through the period.
The Model Record
- In contrast, the history of models provides a more technical and exact record of buildings, styles and (in the case of model engineering) machinery and vehicles from other times. With past modelmakers having acted as "curators" in deciding what was and wasn’t worth recording in model form, old models provide a contemporary record of real life in miniature, allowing us to assemble, for instance, a tiny transport museum showing the breadth of designs across the early British car industry, within the volume of a small room. Static and working models capture details that might not be present in plans or photographs, such as the look of an oiled piston-rod, or actual colours that cannot be reliably determined from early colour photography or black-and-white images.
Significant Updates and Additions, to 2019:
Dec 2019
Nov 2019
Oct 2019
Sept 2019
August 2019
June 2019
May 2019
April 2019
March 2019
February 2019
January 2019
December 2018
November 2018
October 2018
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July 2018
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April 2018
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December 2017
November 2017October 2017
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August 2017July 2017
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February 2017
December 2016
November 2016:
October 2016:September 2016:
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1892: Parisian street toy-seller [image info] Global Visitor Map for the website (October 2018) [image info] ~1948: A different world: Political globe, immediately post-WW2, made by Chad Valley [image info] 2016: Dollhouse Miniatures leaflet, back [image info] |
Some major manufacturers:
Sections recently or currently being expanded...
Some popular pages
Visiting Brighton and Hove
Brighton - More pages about relevant Brighton-related subjects. The museum is an official Brighton Tourist Information Point, and supplies free maps to visitors, courtesy of VisitBrighton
For authorised editors, the style guidelines are laid out on an example page.