Brighton Toy and Model Museum: toys for all ages

Tucked beneath Brighton station, the Brighton Toy and Model Museum is the kind of place that rewards a bit of curiosity. It occupies four Victorian brick arches on Trafalgar Street, about 4,000 square feet of space that once stored beer barrels — three of them still carry the red triangle trademark of Bass Brewery, the first registered trademark in the UK. It opened in 1991, is run mainly by volunteers as a registered charity, and holds more than 10,000 toys and models, with some counts pushing that past 12,000. The first arch is free to enter and doubles as a VisitBrighton information point, so it is an easy place to wander into without committing first.

The permanent collection covers the British and European golden age of toy making, with pieces dating from before 1900 and from the early twentieth century up to around 1960. You will find vintage model trains, Steiff teddy bears, Victorian dolls and dollhouses, coin-operated mechanical arcade machines and die-cast vehicles by Dinky, Spot-On and Corgi. The railway displays are a highlight, with a large-scale 0 installation from the 1930s and two modern scale 00 layouts you can run yourself at the push of a button. The model collection also takes in engineering exhibition models and large radio-controlled aircraft, mostly fixed-wing planes by Denis Hefford and helicopters by Gordon Bowd.

What keeps the place fresh is how it layers temporary exhibitions over that permanent collection. A major loan at the moment brings together 400 rare 1930s Dinky toys, all made by Meccano, on loan from museum friend David Hatley until at least 2027. It traces the range from the original 1932 Hornby Modelled Miniatures through to their 1934 reinvention as Dinky Toys, and because the early alloy tends to disintegrate, pristine examples are genuinely rare — a collection of 3,500 cars sold at auction in Devon in 2016 for £150,000. The museum is also reconstructing its aviation cabinet to bring together the Skybirds and Britains Aircraft collections, and there is a new pre-war Dinky display of 1930s aircraft.

Two of the biggest names in the collection have stories worth knowing. Dinky Toys were the die-cast zinc-alloy vehicles Meccano Ltd made in Liverpool from 1934 to 1979, starting as railway accessories before becoming a range in their own right. Corgi, launched by Mettoy in 1956 and now owned by Hornby, is best known for the Aston Martin DB5 from Goldfinger, the Batmobile, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, the Monkeemobile and the Yellow Submarine. And the Steiff collection traces back to Margarete Steiff, who founded her company in 1880 and whose nephew Richard designed the first jointed teddy bear in 1902, inspired by the story of Theodore Roosevelt refusing to shoot a tied bear. The famous button in the ear trademark arrived in 1904, and the company motto remains 'Only the best is good enough for children'.

Beyond the shelves, the museum runs twice-yearly Train Running Days in spring and autumn and has hosted Brighton Fringe, Brighton Science Festival, Sofar Sounds and the Toy Museum Folk Club. It also maintains an internal toy repair and restoration workshop and publishes the Brighton Toy and Model Index, an online encyclopedia of toys made up to the late 1960s. The whole place is wheelchair accessible with a ramp to the main galleries and a disabled toilet, and it takes everything from American Express to Visa. It is a two-minute walk from the station and about twenty from the beach, so it fits easily into a day in town.