London Toy Museum

[J Yoder]

In 1988, during a family move from West Berlin to the US, my family spent a week in the London area. Highlights included visiting Pendon, Romney, Hythe and Dymchurch and the London Toy Museum. I was in First Grade at the time (and so my memory is a bit fuzzy(, but there is this one exhibit I remember from the now-defunct Toy Museum. It was some sort of layout that depicted a modern city. To view the layout, visitors "rode" up a fake elevator and then watched some sort of "story" unfold. I remember a helicopter "flying" over the city with a video camera attached to it. I also remember that the show ended with a UFO flying down from the ceiling.

Does anybody know anything about this layout or display? What happened to it after the museum closed? I've tried to search the Internet, but all I've found is a Youtube video of the Live Steam operation in the courtyard (which I also remember).

[J Yoder]

Correction: It was the London Toy and Model Museum.

[Mickey]

There was and maybe still is a 'Toy Museum' in west London in a old victorian house that had a fairly large layout in the back garden of the house if thats the one you mean?.

I visited the above place back in around 1993/94 and the museum was inside a old 3 storey victorian house in west London a few roads on passed Paddington station and as said there was a fairly large layout in the back garden of different gauges but apart from a lot of rooms full of toys on the three different floors of the house and the layout in the back garden i can't really remember to much more about it but it was a pleasant couple of hours spent on a Saturday afternoon and the layout in the back garden was quite good actually.

Mickey

[Autocar Publicity]

Time for a rambling 'me too' post...

Memories are very fuzzy - my last visit must have been in the late 80s/very early 90s - but I remember going a few times and having a good time. I remember inside and out both being interesting. Like the OP, I saw a live steam in the back courtyard garden.

[Mickey]

The garden layout had several different guage layouts within it and from memory there was a G-gauge track layout amongst the other gauges which had a B.R.(WR) Hymek diesel in blue livery plus x2 B.R.Mk2 coaches on it but i don't remember seeing that loco & it's x2 coaches actually moving that afternoon mores the pity because that diesel and those x2 coaches looked quite impressive actually compared to the other guages and there trains running on them.

Mickey

[Horsetan]

The London Toy & Model Museum was in Bayswater, situated at 21 Craven Hill, W2. The layout in the garden had facility for running Gauge O, 1, 3.5" (I think) and 5" gauge. It enjoyed a heyday in the 1980s, especially during the GWR150 celebrations.

All long gone. Even its building was demolished, and is now the inevitable block of very expensive flats.