Category:North London metal-casting companies: Difference between revisions

Before and after World War Two, North London was (and probably still is) littered with small engineering fabrication companies that could produce metal toys on lead (predominantly pre-war), or, post-war, using the new diecasting alloys and hardware.

The Britains Limited legacy

For reasons that are not wholly clear (but might be due to the existence of Britains Ltd. in North London since the Nineteenth Century, and the large number of experienced employees and ex-employees that the company created), North London developed an extensive ecosystem of heavily-networked small producers, all vying for sales that the largest producers missed.

While the major brands (other than Britains) were in other parts of the country – Meccano Ltd were in Liverpool, Corgi Toys had a new grant-assisted factory in Wales, and Spot-On were produced in a new factory in Northern Ireland – almost all of Britain's other metal cast toys came from the North London area, to the extent that it's easier to name the small companies that weren't in the area (Horton were initially in North-West London, and then Yorkshire) than those that were.

Many of these small producers had some or all of their toy output aggregated by separate distributors who would deal with branding and distribution, often assembling a branded product line from the output of a large number of separate local producers, to the extent that with many of the small diecast toys from minor brands, although we may know the name on the box, we don't know (and may never know) which company actually manufactured them.