Welcome to the Toys Department


In this spin-off from my regular pop culture blog, I'll be focusing on some of the toys I owned growing up in the 1960s and early 70s. Many of them are the actual items I had bought for me at the time, over numerous birthdays and Christmases - some I've replaced with cleaner or complete versions sourced online and from toy fairs. I'll also, occasionally, consider some of the toys I always coveted but never got to own – like the 'Deluxe Reading Dashboard', an American import once glimpsed and never forgotten. 

What you won't find here is anything from the 1980s or later, or anything earlier than the 1960s unless it serves to illustrate a later development.

To begin, let's take a trip back to consider the state of toy retailing in Britain in the 60s and 70s...

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A Visit to the Toy Shop

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  Growing up, a trip to the local toyshop was a much anticipated treat – even if we did, on the whole, go there almost every Saturday. In the 1960s and 70s, most provincial towns included at least one specialist retailer of toys: these were always independent traders, occasionally with branches in a couple of locations, but more usually confined to one retail premises. There were no chainstores such as Toys R Us, and all were of relatively modest proportions. From the age of six months to six years, I lived in the cathedral city of Lichfield. To call it a city is to overstate its modest dimensions – at the time, it was merely a small market town that was, in the post-war era, being slowly enlarged to offer overspill housing to people from Birmingham – which is how my parents came to move there in September 1961. For such a small place, Lichfield was remarkably well served by toy retailers. The biggest and arguably the most prestigious of them was W. Osborne’s on Bore Street, a shop...
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