Category:Brighton Toy and Model Museum

Entrance and second arch of Brighton Toy and Model Museum, shadowed [image info]

Charity Registration Certificate 1001560 [image info]

Brighton Toy and Model Museum is one of the World's key centres of excellence for the preservation and display of toys and models, focusing on the golden age of British toymaking from the first to the fifth decades of the Twentieth Century.

1900s-1950s

During this period, Britain saw an explosion in metal toymaking as the industrial revolution finally caught up with the industry, and as local companies found that they could now enter a market (metal toys) previously dominated by German brands. It also saw an influx of toymaking talent from the Continent as political instability abroad prompted a wave of skilled émigrés and refugees looking for the comparative political stability of the UK. As production shifted from wood to metal, the industry shifted from producing individually hand-carved pieces created by unnamed partworkers and local carpentry workshops, to the use of highly-promoted brandnames and modern factory production. Talented and creative toy designers of the period could now see their works being sold and promoted to a wider audience, and great toy design became something that could transmute a simple piece of low-tech printed and folded tinplate into a mass market product. The Golden Age saw the creation of some of the world's best-known toy designs, including Frank Hornby's Meccano, and Lego (which was based on designs by UK plastic toys pioneer Hilary Page).

Post-war

The metal age was followed after WW2 by the domination of plastics, which undercut metal production and often resulted in an emphasis on lower production costs rather than on design excellence. There were exceptions, but mass-production and increased internationalisation now meant that power was no longer focused in local workshops or national factories, but in international corporations, whose centralised design meant that toys increasingly became designed for a global market - UK's "Action Man" was a localised version of the American "G.I. Joe" toys, and while the wave of Star Wars merchandise in the 1970s was obviously founded on world-class art and production design, the resulting toys were essentially the same across all international markets.

Plastics were followed by the appearance of embedded electronics, then by video games and home computers and mobile games consoles, then by completely software-based games, and finally (post-2000) by mobile "apps".

While each of these periods has their stand-out examples, finite display space means that the Museum usually focuses on toys and models produced up until about 1955 - this provides the best balance between the proliferation of unsourceable "workshop toys" before 1900, and the strong internationalisation of the toy market that characterised the later Twentieth Century. This period starts when road travel was predominantly by horse, ends in the Atomic Age, and includes two World Wars. It also includes toys that reflected the visionary technological optimism of the 1930s, before this was cruelly cut down by the outbreak of World War Two.

For us, this represents the most individualistic period of toy production, with pieces that tell real stories about social history and change, and design and industrial development, both locally and internationally.