Photograph: Adrian Sherratt/The Guardian
Once upon a time – well, only the other day, actually, a Monday morning during the summer holidays – in the beautiful city of Bath, there stood a building. Just across from the railway station. It was – still is – a grand, handsome building, built not so long ago but in a Georgian style befitting its historic surroundings. But it is not a happy building because its owners fell on hard times and left. Now the Debenhams building stands empty, haunted by the ghosts of sales assistants, a relic of a different, happier retail age.
Hold the violins, though, and walk round the corner to St Lawrence Street, where you will find a little pocket of life – joy even – occupying a unit within the same building. Here is a window filled with hot-air balloons, a red pedal car, mice, a huge fantasy wooden castle. It could be Mr Magorium’s Wonder Emporium, Toy Story 2, Big, Angela Carter even, if you want to go darker or classier: choose your own cultural comparison. This independent toy shop, called My Small World, is run by a woman called Dawn Burden and I’m spending the morning here.
First, before going inside to play, the why part. Because this little scene in Bath is a bigger retail picture in microcosm. Amid widespread high street misery, department stores closing, and familiar names moving online or vanishing entirely, for toy shops the story is less doom and gloom, more boom.
Sales in toy shops from January to June 2022 were up 44% on the same period last year. Duh, you say: lockdown at the start of 2021, that’s why. True, that does have a lot to do with it – but what about this? Even in the second quarter of 2022, sales were up 13% versus the same period in 2021, when shops were open.
Speaking from his home in Donaghadee, County Down, Alan Simpson, who has been in the business for more than 40 years and is chairman of the Toy Retailers Association, says there was a bit of extra money around for some people. “People on furlough didn’t have the expense of going to work; they weren’t able to get away on holiday. I think parents felt able to push the boat out a bit when it came to expenditure on toys and the kids reaped the benefit.”
There are about 600 toy shops in Britain, well down on 900 five years ago, but that trend is changing. After what it describes as a bumper year, the Toy Retailers Association expects the number of actual physical shops to increase by 10% over the next two years. As well as chairing the association, Simpson runs the Toytown chain, which has about 30 stores across the UK. Last year it opened two new shops; this year it will be three. “If your competitors are moving forward and you’re not, you’re basically reversing.”
My Small World in Bath is not part of a chain. Burden opened up 17 years ago, in a different part of town, next to Waitrose, and she admits that is her target market. The stuff she sells is tasteful, old-fashioned, wholesome. There are no batteries, not a lot of plastic, plenty of wood. It’s not displayed according to age or gender. “Boys love doll’s houses; girls like building things. I think we’re beyond that,” she says. “It’s important we’re edging boys towards being nurturing and girls towards engineering.”
It’s not cheap. You can get a string of coloured twist-and-lock blocks for £2 or a make-your-own nodding cat for £3, but the most expensive doll’s house is 300 full-sized adult quid, as is the red metal pedal car in the window. “Things like that will last,” says Jo Salmon. “They’ll pass them down to their kids. It’s important to be sustainable now.”
Jo is here with her children, Thea, eight, and Laurie, five. It’s Laurie’s favourite shop. Thea likes the books and the arty stuff. They are local; hadn’t planned to come in, were just passing. Mum got steered through the door.
Pester power, plus the lure of the toy shop window, is paying off – soon after opening time, it’s already busy. “I like it because there are things my seven-year-old only wants to do on the screen,” says Cheryl Burnside about her son Sam, who is there along with three-year-old David. “He wants to play Minecraft, he wants to play Roblox. But here he’s like: ‘Oh, look – a balancing bird!’ That’s not something he would have been exposed to. It’s important to let them go in and play around.” She ends up getting the bird for Sam and a book for David. They are not local – they are on holiday from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
It’s good to have the tourists back, says Burden. While I’m in the shop, French, German and Cornish (“escaping the crowds”) families come into the shop. The Cogswell family – mum Millie, Arthur, 10, and Phillip, three – aren’t tourists. They are from Bath but currently living in Saudi Arabia for work; they have returned for a visit. “It’s nice to be back where anything goes, and kids are still kids and allowed to play with rainbow toys,” says Millie.
“They’re banning rainbow toys and clothes,” explains Arthur about the Saudi authorities seizing kids’ stuff they think promotes homosexuality. He leaves with a build-your-own crank-operated doorbell, natural wood coloured, but it could be painted like a rainbow. Phillip gets a tugboat for the bath.
Louise Evans and Emily Weston don’t have kids but do work with them. They are primary school teachers from Swindon, and understand the importance of the physical shop. “If you can see something, you can visualise your child, or someone else’s child, with it,” says Louise. “If I buy something online for the classroom I don’t really know what it’s going to be like.” Again they were just passing by. They are in town on a girls’ day out to visit an actual bricks-and-mortar bookshop. Hey, shopping on the internet is so pre-pandemic – the future is in-store.
Juno, 10, agrees about the importance of going into a shop. “You can interact with stuff and they let you try things out,” she says. Right now she is interacting with a mouse wearing a striped dress lying in a little bed inside a matchbox. “I love tiny stuff and making tiny little worlds.” A mouse in a matchbox is £23.50.
“We’ve been known to spend far too much money in here,” says Juno’s dad, Joe Short. But in tough times, maybe especially in tough times, people spend money on different things. “Even in the shit, people look after their kids. That’s not a bad spend. You don’t tell yourself off for that, whereas you don’t feel so great about drinking that extra bottle of wine. Buying a toy for your loved one is sort of righteous.”
Burden thinks the past couple of years might have seen some family bonds strengthened. “I wonder whether people are more tuned into their children because they spent a lot of time with them in lockdown. Maybe children are more visible in their lives than they were pre-pandemic.”
Good news for children, good news for toy shops, good news for Dawn. Last year was My Small World’s busiest ever. By November, sales were back to where they were before Covid. Now, month on month, they are pre-pandemic plus 24%. Even taking into account higher-than-average inflation, that is doing well. I’m not a financial journalist but I believe the technical term is ker-ching.
Incidentally, here they have a little set of steps at the counter so smaller people can climb up and get involved. The woman currently paying, Felicity Lynch, doesn’t need it: she hasn’t brought any of her five children along “because they grab everything”. But she likes to come in rather than going online. “I prefer to be able to look and touch and feel.” Today she is getting a wooden puzzle toy for her soon-to-be two-year-old daughter for £16.
Simpson agrees about the need for physical shops – that’s why he keeps opening his own Toytown stores: “It would be incredibly detrimental for toy shops to go only online. You remember being brought into a toy shop when you were a child – it’s a magical experience children remember for the rest of their lives. There’s no magic in a cardboard box arriving.”
Tough times ahead though, right? “I’m cautious without getting depressed about it,” Simpson says. “We know what’s going on out there with petrol and electric and gas prices. There’s a lot less disposable income about. I think people are starting to batten down the hatches and look for value. We’re aware that going into the back end of the year isn’t going to be the same as last year.”
A lot will depend on what kind of support the new prime minister is going to deliver. But for his business, and for Burden and all the others, there is another, potentially even more important saviour who never fails to deliver, even if it is only once a year. “The difference between toys and most retailers is that Santa comes at Christmas time, and parents push the boat out to try to make sure there’s a good Christmas for the kids.”
And so they all lived happily ever after. For the time being at least.
