Stories

With Regency fashions currently cutting a dash across our screens, we have been immersing ourselves in the life of Grimaldi, the most popular English entertainer of the Regency Era. Born into a family of dancers and comic performers in the slum known as Clare Market, Covent Garden he was a principle performer at the Theatre…

5th May is ‘Children’s Day’ (Kodomo no hi) in Japan. Originally a celebration for boys ‘Tango-no-sekku’ is celebrated by displaying dolls. The ‘May Dolls’ called Gogatsu Ningyo are made to wish good fortune and health on the boys. In Japanese culture, it is often said that a human soul inhabits the body of a doll….

Our link to Pollock’s Toy Museum in Fitzrovia is through it’s founder Marguerite Fawdry. Growing up in London, I was a frequent visitor to the Museum and sometimes my parents would pack me off to stay with my surrogate grandparents Marguerite & Kenneth in Fitzrovia.  Me at Pollock’s Toy Museum in the 1970s Marguerite was…

  Do you think Fairy Tales are only book stories ? Are you one of those who believe that Fairy Tales can be seen only in movies or in theatre plays ?  Do you really believe those characters are unreachable and very distant from you ? Well… you might have to rethink all that. Benjamin…

I smile to myself when I think how ONLY Pollock’s customers would literally hold up the queue by dressing up as a 18th century society lady and turning up to Trafalgar Square. In 2015 we were running a workshop (for 20,000 people) at West End Live’s annual theatrical showcase.  Artist Olia Manizer, who came to Pollocks…

1st June is International Children’s Day and to mark this whilst the shop is closed during the health crisis we asked all our podcast guests to allow us to make a print of their favourite image and offer exclusive sales to raise money for The TOY Project, a charity based in North London that recycles…

Working for an enterprise with such enthralling history behind it, I every so often find myself speculating how those heroes of the past felt….  Whenever I explore the history of Benjamin Pollock’s Toyshop, I see it as a vivid theatrical work divided into dramatic acts. Raphael Pinheiro Gonçalves March 2020 The History of Benjamin Pollock…

Working for an enterprise with such enthralling history behind it, I every so often find myself speculating how those heroes of the past felt whilst working through wars and personal tragedy. I try to transport myself to the mid-19th century, more accurately to 1851, as an attempt to imagine what it was like, when a…

An exhibition by Viola Ann Seddon With titles by Simon Seddon Copyright Viola Ann Seddon & Simon Seddon Benjamin Pollock’s Toyshop Easter 2020  

Toy theatre friends The best thing about running in a shop is meeting all your customers. Some who become friends, podcast guests, artistic collaborators. At the end of last year I was trying to source a toy theatre.  The ballet in a box ‘Swan Lake’ by Jean Mahoney and Viola Ann Seddon, published by Walker…

Hugo Cabret: ‘Maybe that’s why a broken machine always makes me a little sad, because it isn’t able to do what it was meant to do… Maybe it’s the same with people. If you lose your purpose… it’s like you’re broken.’ I’m a technician with a special interest in the very early days of motion…

Here is a beguiling story I once read about Franz Kafka who in 1923, a year before his death, was walking through a park in Berlin when he across a small girl in a state of distress. The child was inconsolable as she had lost her favourite doll. Not missing a beat, Kafka immediately informed…

“To me it’s normal now, being out and about taking pictures, it looks really crazy but to me it’s perfectly normal. I guess I do express myself” This is not a quote from luminary female photographer Cindy Sherman with a current retrospective at the National Portrait Gallery on until the 15th September, but the doll…

In our podcast ‘From the Forest to the Fantastical’ Simon uses allegories of adventures of Dutch Dolls and folk art toys. Through them, he tells the story of the toy industry and the aesthetic of ‘folk art’ and in Britain the ‘popular art’ of toy theatre, Punch and Judy and fairground art that today filters…

Artists and the need to play Artists often tap into their inner child to make toys. Picasso made a miniature theatre fashioned out of an empty Gauloises cigarette packet for his children Maya and Paulo, with tiny paper cut-out figures of commedia del’arte characters for them to perform on the dinky stage. Many artists made…