Cabinet of Curiosities

In Mary Poppins (1934) and, later, Disney's film adaptation, a bird woman sells bags of crumbs on the steps of St Paul's. It's an evocative image

- Luke Honey

This Month: Penny toys

But, 110 years ago, you were as likely to buy a 'penny' toy as a bag of pigeon food. For enterprising pedlars (also known as 'gutter merchants') congregated in the streets surrounding the cathedral, selling a wide variety of cheap toys.

In the years preceding the First World War, Germany exported numerous toys to Britain, Europe and America. Historically, the Bavarian town of Nuremberg was a centre for toy making. The great companies of Bing (in Nuremberg) and Märklin (in Baden-Württemberg) made magnificent working toys of ingenuity and quality (especially trains and ships) for the children of the middle and upper classes. These were relatively expensive, beyond the reach of the average working man. In comparison, the humble penny toy, produced between 1890 and 1935, was affordable to all but the destitute. European toy companies produced penny toys, only a few inches in length, from a variety of materials: tinplate and paper (from Nuremberg), cast iron and lead (from Paris) and wood (from Erzgebirge). The tinplate toys are beautiful, with huge aesthetic appeal, and this perfection in miniature is, understandably, of considerable interest to serious toy collectors.