Toys
I do
not have my Hornby model train in my flat in Germany, it is packed in boxes at
my Dad’s house where it has been unseen for several years, perhaps it is time
that Dad and I have another play with it next visit.
I do
have my N-gauge model on the coffee table beside me as I write, as seen in the
picture above. I love spending dark winter evenings making the buildings.
I have
just read in my Guardian Weekly that Hornby is bringing part of its
manufacturing industry back to Britain. They will be producing a new Airfix
range, Quickbuild, that does not require glue, in Sussex.
I
assume from this news that the model-train manufacture will not yet be returning to
British soil, but maybe one day!
The
area where I live was the toy manufacturing area of the City of Nürnberg, a
city that is still famous for its annual Toy Exhibition. All the model-train
manufacturing and tin-toy manufacturing that made the city famous no longer takes place around the corner
from my front door, the factories have recently been converted into private
flats and the Fleischmann advert painted on the wall is now hidden behind the
newly built parking spaces.
If these manufactures ever return to their home they will need to find new homes, their original homes now being homes for city dwellers.
1 comment:
That's really interesting news
Perhaps few of your readers will be over-concerned with the specific focus of the piece (Airfix) but the general matter is generally heartening – that economies like the UK might return to manufacturing – for its wider social and personal effects as much as its financial and economic ones. Let us hope that it indicates a long-term economic swing that will benefit all of us.
It will be nice to repatriate the manufacture of some of the Airfix kit range, a positive step in the long climb back to full toy manufacture. I do agree with you that it is a shame that along the way established manufacturing communities disappeared in the flight to the East but discontinuity is a perhaps an essential feature of all development.
Nicholas Kove (born Klein Miklós), the Jewish former Husszar officer whose varied life experiences included serving as a minister in the government of Béla Kun's 1919 Hungarian Soviet Republic, might have appreciated this – as well as inventing Airfix:
http://www.conductive-world.info/2008/01/and-now-for-something-completely.html
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