Brighton Toy and Model Museum is packed from floor to ceiling, with so many vintage pieces on display. You could spend hours in this, relatively small space (twelve thousand items, four thousand square feet) and still miss the treasure housed at every turn.
The location itself is of some significance. BT&M museum occupies a set of four Victorian cellars under Brighton train station. If you’re arriving by rail, there’s a good chance you’d pass over it and not realise what you missed (we certainly did on earlier visits to Brighton). Equally, if you’re browsing the vibrant variety of shops on the iconic Brighton Lanes, there’s a fair risk you’d miss it in the mix (again, we did).
That may be about to change as the museum has successfully funded a project to fully glaze the exterior of the building and draw more guests in.
It was on our third visit to Brighton that we paid a long overdue visit to this very special attraction, which will have been open 35 years as of this summer. Of all the toy based museums we’ve visited to date, this one is markedly vintage. I would guess that there isn’t much on display here from 1980 onwards.
The majority of the collection belongs to museum founder and director, Christopher Littledale. In an interview with the BBC, Chris revealed his collector origins, which is certainly a familiar story.
“Ever since a young lad at 13 I collected toy trains, model railways, and all sorts of models and toys. I amassed so much, literally hundreds and hundreds of pieces. People used to come round to my flat and laugh, we decided we had to do something with it”.
“Then we came upon these premises. I found them one day, British Railways property board ‘To Let’ – right, great! So in we moved…”
Vintage Lego display
Although our own collections lean more towards a ‘modern’ classification (within the last 25 years-ish), there were plenty of familiar sights and characters throughout the display cabinets, including these two chaps – Bill and Ben.
‘The Flower Pot Men’ was a BBC children’s TV series that broadcast originally between 1951 and 1953. The sunflower character between the two, Little Weed, also featured in the show. The series was a fair bit before our time, but our parents’ generation must have grown up with it repeated in the 1960s and passed it down to us.
The figures themselves, produced by Sacul are made of lead and date back to the early 1950s also. Based on previous auction sales these are likely now worth over £1,000. You may recognise some of the other characters on display in this cabinet, including Andy Pandy, Peter Rabbit and Jemima Puddle-Duck.
A selection of the museum’s puppets
While it may seem like this museum is frozen in time, it’s actually an evolving space with plenty of ‘new’ old items and exhibits being added, plus upgrades to the existing layout. For example, recent donations have allowed to the museum to upgrade their puppet display space, increasing the number of pieces that can now be exhibited.
There are also temporary exhibits, giving chance for archive items to be seen again. Recent displays have included Paddington Bear and board games, the latter they acknowledged as being slightly outside their remit of ‘toys and models’ – we’ll let them off on this!
Vintage Meccano and Corgi Toys
Brighton Toy and Model Museum is open Tuesday (10am til 5pm) to Saturday (11am til 5pm), with last entry at 4:30pm each day. Tickets prices range between £5 and £8 for children and adults (respectively) with concessionary rates for senior citizens, students and carers, plus family group tickets. For more details visit brightontoymuseum.co.uk
Liam Toms 