C is for Christmas Exhibition - 1 of 5 - Construction Blocks

The Fleet & Crookham Local History Group had got their Christmas exhibition up and running the next time I visited after mentioning it the other day week, and I duly shot it for posterity and our annual visit, which starts here!

This year they had a themed display on each shelf, concentrating on construction toys, ancient and modern and I will be looking at each shelf on a separate post to limit the images to manageable 'lumps'

It's not just Lego that copied (stole, pirated . . . ) the Hestair Kiddicraft Self-Locking Building Bricks of Hilary Page, many other clones have come and gone, some compatible some [deliberately?] not, while the search for an alternate system also goes-on, K'nex having come closest so far.

The top shelf of this seasons display contains various other makes, and here we see (from the left) a Minibrixs signal box for O-guage model railway layouts (11), a farm loader (or 'tele-porter') from Click Brick (6) and a Kreo 'Transformer' (1) and one imagines there was no more care paid to a Transformers license as there was to a Lego (or Kiddicraft) license!

Sta-Lox soft-plastic polyethylene bricks come from the former colonies (Canada) and we all seem to have had a few kicking-about in the toy zone when we were kids, although I suspect a fair few of them were actually Hong Kong sub-copies, or locally produced under license by Merit or Peter Pan or someone like that? They were meant to represent real house-bricks, they made better stone forts (as here) and were quite useful, if you wanted something simple, in red, as that was the extent of their invention!

Ignore the blue thing, that's Lego on the shelf below (next post) and starting with the tractor (2); we have products from an unknown contract manufacturer for My Toys/Kandy Toys, an importer seen here at Small Scale World a few times now, a mini-jeep/ATV and gun, also from Click Brick (3), with modern architecture (well, when I say 'modern', I mean a mid-century/post-war, Bauhaus/post-modern Walter Gropius style of modern!) in the centre, from Bell (8), Merit (J&L Randall) would inherit the moulds, and there are both Spanish and Italian copies or licensed-versions of this simple polyethylene, stacking, infant toy.

Behind it is an Ice Castle from Mega Blocks (also Canadian - 13), with a pirate ship from K'nex with the new(-'ish) blocks bringing it closer to Lego (12) off to the left, Click Brick's tele-porter in front. While going right we have a Block Tech (Poundland, The Works etc...) Rock Drill (4) with a Wilco (also Block Tech - as contractor) dinosaur in the background, there's another, baby one on the corner.

We finish with Airfix's Eurofighter Typhoon (9) and Character Options Challenger Tank (14) with two from Nano Blocks - Big Ben and Tower Bridge, a sort of half-scale or miniaturised Kiddicraft/Lego block system from Japan (5).

A look back down the shelf for a better angle on one or two of them, the gun and dinosaur are probably better in this shot.

Still on display in Fleet library.