Pollock’s Display and Live Toy Theatre
6 December 2024 - 12 January 2025
In Lower Branson Coates | 136 Kingsland Road, London E2 8EA
Enjoy a display of historic toy theatre from Pollock's Toy Museum, founded just a stone's throw away from Museum of the Home.
The Bottle Imp on the stage of a Pollock ‘Egyptian’ theatre (from the collection of Pollock’s Toy Museum, as displayed in 2022 at the exhibition Cardboard Gothic at Strawberry Hill House) Photo Matt Chung
Named after Benjamin Pollock (1856-1937) who made and sold toy theatres in nearby Hoxton Street, Pollock's Toy Museum began in 1956 and grew into a major independent collection of worldwide historic toys.
What is Live Toy Theatre?
Live Toy Theatre involves pushing cardboard cut-out figures across the stage while speaking the lines, changing the scenery and adding sound effects. The aim is to use copies of the extremely rare 1830s period ‘Twopence Coloured’ sheets, and the original reduced script, to conjure up the effect of the original stage play.
The history of The Living Art of Toy Theatre
From 1811 onwards, children could purchase paper prints to colour and cut out, based on the latest plays on the London stage. Sparking a craze for performances, creating wooden stages which families and friends could exercise their dramatic talents. Among those who later became famous were novelist Charles Dickens, architect Augustus Pugin, painter John Everett Millais and the author of Treasure Island, Robert Louis Stevenson, who wrote an evocative essay on his boyhood memories in 1884, ‘A Penny Plain and Twopence Coloured.’
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Toy theatre survived until the Second World War, at Benjamin Pollock’s quaint stationers’ shop at 73 Hoxton Street, a stone’s throw from what is now the Museum of the Home. His daughters carried on after he died in 1937, but the war was too much for them. Luckily, the stock was rescued, including many paper prints, plain and coloured, and a treasure trove of metal printings plates, some dating back to the 1830s.
The rescuer was a rare book dealer, Alan Keen, who restarted the business with more flair than commercial realism after the war. Despite his praiseworthy efforts, which included mass production printing and theatre making, his company went bankrupt. Fortunately, it was rescued a second time by Marguerite Fawdry who created Pollock’s Toy Museum in 1956 to provide an added attraction and context for her shop. She encouraged children to perform the plays, starting with simplified versions and advancing to complex melodramas and pantomimes, so toy theatre never died. The branch shop she started in Covent Garden Market in 1980 survives as a separate business from the museum, which as an independent trust, has recently re-opened at sites in Croydon and Leadenhall Market.
Pollock's Toy Museum is currently at Whitgift Centre, Croyden and Leadenhall Market, with a programme of exhibitions, workshops and performances.
Own a Pollock's Theatre cut-out book
Pollock’s theatres as cut-out books are available for sale in the Museum of the Home shop:
- Alice in Wonderland
- Twelfth Night
- Sleeping Beauty
