Images from a 1950s’ Toy Shop …

January 10, 2020

Filed under Toys
Tags: 1950s toys, miniatures, playing at Real Life, toy shop

4 responses

As you look at these pictures (above and below), you could be forgiven for thinking you’d walked into a 1950s grocery shop. These miniature tins and packets – with their proportionally scaled-down appearance and labels – are exact copies of goods available at the time. They are a particularly nostalgic sight to anyone who grew up in the 1950s and ’60s – and doubly delightful for being toy-sized.

All these items have been safely stashed away and recently rediscovered by their owner, Nicholas from Suffolk, whose mother preserved them. (Like many post-war parents, who had experienced rationing and shortages, she had a natural hoarding instinct.) Nicholas was inspired by seeing my tiny collection of such items and wrote to tell me how, as a child, he had had a toy baker’s shop with loaves and cakes, etc. He explained, “I then ‘branched out’ and had a grocery department as well.”

I am very grateful to Nicholas for getting in touch and allowing me to share his photographs on this site. I do hope you enjoy poring over the pictures. It’s surprising how many of these goods are still available and how some of the packaging has changed very little in over half a century.

Can you imagine children today being allowed to play with toys with such small parts? Health and safety laws assume that all children must be protected from stupidity. (When I played at dolls’ tea parties in the garden I never ate the poisonous snow berries that served as ‘potatoes’ or the soil and water ‘gravy’ and grass ‘greens’ that I dished up on my toy plates! I wonder how many children did.)

    

All photos in this post are © Nicholas of Suffolk 2020

I particularly enjoyed seeing this miniature Home Made Assortment chocolate box as, when I was a child, an identical, but real full-sized box (a little bigger than a man’s hand), was the container in which I kept all my Britain’s toy farm animals.

Comments Feed