Saturday 26 September 2020

 WIN A BRIGHTON TOY AND MODEL MUSEUM FAMILY TICKET FOR FREE ADMISSION FOR AN ENTIRE YEAR


Take part in our Toy Museum Photo Competition and win free visits to the museum as often as you like for a year!


All you have to do is bring one of your own favourite toys to the museum and take a photo with it next to your favourite toy in the museum, tag it with #FavouriteToyComp and post it on Twitter or Instagram. The best one will win a FREE ANNUAL FAMILIY TICKET! That’s free admission for two adults and three children as often as you like for an entire year!


@ us on @TheToyMuseum on Twitter or @BrightonToyMuseum on Instagram with the hashtag #FavouriteToyComp and we’ll select a winner from all the tagged photos on the 19th of December.
We can’t wait to see all your photos of your favourite toys! And don’t forget to follow the hashtag to see what other people’s photos look like.





Saturday 7 December 2019





Looking for a change of pace during the Christmas Shopping? Why not pop into Brighton Toy Museum?


If you’re looking for something a little bit different to do with the kids this Christmas, why not bring them along to our funky little museum based conveniently right underneath Brighton train station? We’ve got a whole wonderland of different toys, dolls, games and construction kits to look at and reminisce over, and to impress your young ‘uns with that you know what they are and how they work!

You’ll never seem more relevant than when the toys you loved as a child are now exhibits in a museum.


We’ve got brilliant collections of all kinds of cars, trains, construction sets, stuffed toys with brilliant characterful faces and currently there’s a traditional Danish Christmas market, constructed entirely out of Lego.

Walk Back To A World Of Analogue


Take a break from the overstimulating toys with flashing lights and electronic sounds and calm yourself with the gentle clatter of a Hornby trainset and the gentle whirr of a huge Ferris wheel hand built out of Meccano. Give yourself a minute or two to look at the stuff that kids had to play with decades ago and remember simpler times. And, if they really take your fancy, look in the museum shop to see if any are available to buy.

We don’t sell exhibits, but we do stock a fit to burst range of model trains, toy cars, Revel and Airfix model planes and tanks, books on a range of subjects, but mostly about steam trains, and postcards. We offer local tourist information for free too.

So next time you’re in Brighton and you’re looking for something to break up the day, you want to entertain the kids, or bring your own parents for a bit of a treat, come to Brighton Toy and Model Museum. You won’t be disappointed.

Brighton Toy and Model Museum will be closed between Christmas and New Year to give all our wonderful volunteers the opportunity to enjoy their festive frolics. After we close at 5pm on Sat 21st Dec we'll be shut until opening as normal on 2nd January 2020. We wish all our lovely customers and supporters a happy and healthy Christmas and New Year! Looking forward to seeing everyone in 2020!

Saturday 20 July 2019

Reaching Kids In Our Community


Charity campaign proposal

Collect money from donors and sponsors in order to allow underprivileged children, inc children in care, foster children, children in families who receive benefits and use food banks, children with learning and physical handicaps who wouldn’t normally use our facilities the chance to bypass the cost barrier to entry.

As we are an independent charity who needs entry fees to pay for the rent, wage bill and upkeep of the museum it’s not possible to give free entry to children and families who don’t have the disposable income to spend on a ticket to Brighton Toy and Model Museum. While these children and families are the very ones who would get most out of and enjoy a fun day out at our museum, they are kept out by our need to make enough money to keep the doors open. It is therefore my proposal that we should approach individuals and organisations in order to collect a Fund which is dedicated to the inclusion of otherwise excluded members of our community.

I see the Fund being spent in several ways depending on the success of the campaign to raise funds and the children we see as most fit to benefit from the Fund.

1, To simply pay the price of a family ticket to applicants from the care services for children and their adult. (research will be required to identify care homes, foster homes & foster families, making them aware of this opportunity)

2, To broaden the scope of our target audience to include children with special needs who would enjoy a day out in an environment suited to their needs, ie, we have wheelchair access, but some forms of autism require quiet/low stimulus areas in order to be comfortable. (May require opening when the Museum is normally closed. Pay volunteers to come in on their day off out of The Fund?)

3, Broaden our scope further to include children of families on a low income who can’t afford ‘luxuries’ such as a visit to our museum. Simple leaflets & posters in the food bank should suffice if they have an application on the bottom which parents can fill in. Copy should be worded to avoid stigma or embarrassment.

4, Look into the possibility of using the Fund to pay for inviting paid  guests to speak exclusively to members of above mentioned sectors of our community. Initial invitees could include people we know enjoy the museum, such as Chris Riddell, author and illustrator, to give a class on drawing. Jane Hissey, author of the Old Bear Stories to give a class on creative writing, etc.

Saturday 16 March 2019

How To Sponsor Brighton Toy And Model Museum


Brighton Toy and Model Museum is looking for sponsorship, here's how you can help.



No doubt you're aware that museums and galleries all over the country need sponsorship in order to be able to carry out their vital work keeping history alive and offering a place for our community to get in touch with their past and present in order to make a better future.
Brighton Toy and Model Museum does this not only by providing a place where families can come and look at toys from the past, but also offers an opportunity for volunteers and students to gain skills, experience and contacts in the heritage and tourism sectors. We do charge admission, but in order to be able to carry out our services we also rely on sponsorship from local business and individuals.

So, what's in it for you?


Becoming a sponsor not only earns our eternal gratitude, we offer a range of other benefits too: Your charity sponsorship is tax deductible. We give you a PR4 backlink from our sponsor's page to your website. We have a number of static advertising spaces on Brighton Train Station concourse which are unavailable for other forms of advertising. These include our banner outside the entrance to the train station, swan neck poster boards on the concourse, and the exhibition cabinets currently brightening up the ticket office.
We're very adaptable and have a number of sponsorship packages available, so why not get in touch to see what donating to the Brighton Toy and Model Museum can do for you?

Call on 01273749494 or email jan@brightontoymuseum.co.uk or pop in for a cheeky tour around the museum and a chat about our sponsor benefits.

Saturday 27 October 2018

Monday Motion In The Museum

Did you come to the Kinetic Carousel event we held on Monday?

Last week Brighton Toy and Model Museum opened specially on a Monday. It was half term and we had a Brighton Science event so we thought 'why not open all day?' And it was a great success for all involved, and, as often happens, the adults actually outnumbered the children!

The Kinetic Carousel is a rubber band powered toy which, once you have wound it up, spins wildly. The toy is designed to achieve several principles of science, including stored potential energy being converted into mechanical energy, and the spectrum. The theory being that if you colour in the roof all the colours of the rainbow, when it spins they merge together and appear white.

The design in the manual suggested the traditional horse motif for the outside of the carousel, but Brighton's children are a little more imaginative than that, so, we had a variety of carousels, including Abstract Pattern Carousels, and a designer who clearly had little faith in the project, who created a Flying Pig Carousel.

We regularly take part in local and national events, including Museums at Night, Brighton Science Festival, Half Term and school holiday events, and exhibitions by the students of the Brighton MET college.


Brighton Science Festival






The October VIP Running Day Photo Blog

It’s been so busy here at Brighton Toy and Model Museum that it hasn’t been possible until now to share the pictures we took during our last running day.

We love our running days, it’s so good to see the trains going through their paces and get a really great view of the models and layouts without the Perspex. It seems like such a minor thing, but without the screens all of the trains, buildings, bridges and cars seem just that little bit more visceral.
The running day was a VIP event, meaning we had a roped off area for our special guests where they could chat and enjoy the cakes and pastries laid on for us by Real Patisserie. 
































Saturday 20 October 2018

A Pie And A Pint And Museums At Night


We just wanted to say a huge ‘thank you’ to Higgidy Pies and Bedlam Brewery for the generous donations they’re making for our Museums at Night event, Two Halves of Guinness.

The idea for a pie, a pint and a performance came from Trevor Littledale, the star of the show (and our founder Chris’ brother) and since we all at the museum love to watch a show with a pie and a pint in our hands, we thought this was fab!

A Life Examined


The show centres on the well beloved actor Sir Alec Guinness’ introspection at the time of the release of Star Wars. Sir Alec himself was in no way fond of the movie, and worried that it would be his lasting swansong. He dreaded being remembered for a part he had no liking for. He’d had a career which had lasted several decades, and included roles such as the entire D'Ascoyne family in Kind Hearts and Coronets, the eponymous Man in the White Suit and Colonel Nicholson in Bridge on the River Kwai, the role for which he won his first Academy Award. 

Being immortalised as a mystic who spouted “florid, breathless and embarrassing” lines was something that made him “shrivel up a little.”

Guinness had converted to Catholicism in 1956 and tended to consider the role of a Jedi mystic something of a fraud. He said in an interview with Talk magazine while promoting his autobiography ‘A Positively Final Appearance’ that it was his idea to kill off Ben because: "I just couldn't go on speaking those bloody awful, banal lines. I'd had enough of the mumbo jumbo."

The show Two Halves of Guinness is Brighton Toy and Model Museum’s Museums at Night event. In the past we’ve had great fun with Museums at Night. It’s an opportunity for museums to do something a little out of the ordinary to appeal to people who might not necessarily be interested in museums and galleries to come along and get involved. One year your correspondent bought up all the Barbies and Sindys he could find in every charity shop so that we could make dresses, give them makeovers and make them a little more relatable.

It’s important that we thank our sponsors too. What would a pie, a pint and a performance be without a pie and a pint?


Higgidy Pies are a local pie company who make a variety of delicious pies and pastries, and they’ve given us enough pies (both veggie and meaty) to sustain the hungriest of audience member for the evening. (check out their website, they’re not stingy with their recipes for all kinds of pies, pastries and confectionary either!)

Likewise, Bedlam Brewery, again a local company making fine bitters,ales, and lagers who’re helping us out by letting us have crates of the stuff to share with our visitors on the night.

We really are grateful, as it’s contributions like these that let us do things that would otherwise be outside our scope thanks to expense and inconvenience. You guys are great and we’re looking forward to putting on many more events with your help.

To book your ticket, please follow this eventbrite link


  WIN A BRIGHTON TOY AND MODEL MUSEUM FAMILY TICKET FOR FREE ADMISSION FOR AN ENTIRE YEAR Take part in our Toy Museum Photo Competition and...