About Us
About
About the Founder
It started with one car.
I was a kid who liked Matchbox cars, and I never grew out of it. I kept buying them. Then I started going after the hard ones, the old castings, the ones they stopped making, the variations most people walk right past. That went on for years and years.
What started in a shoebox under my bed ended up filling a building.
I never sold it off. I never split it up. It’s all still here, in one place, and now you can come and see it.
The History of Matchbox
The Legacy of Matchbox Cars
Matchbox began in 1953, and it changed what a toy car could be.
The idea was simple enough. Take a real vehicle, shrink it down, get the details right, and keep it small enough to fit in a matchbox, cheap enough that any kid could own one. A milk float, a fire engine, a sports car you’d only seen in a magazine, sitting in your hand.
Millions of us grew up pushing them across the kitchen floor.
Seventy years on, they’re more than toys. They’re a record of how cars looked, how they were built, and what people wanted to own. That’s the history sitting in these cases.
Want to explore how it all began? Discover the fascinating history of Matchbox cars, from the early Lesney models to the evolution of these iconic miniature vehicles.
Our Story, Our Passion
For a long time this was just my collection. Cases in the house, boxes in the back, more cars than anybody needed.
The problem is what usually happens next. Somebody dies, the family doesn’t know what they’re looking at, and forty years of collecting goes out the door in a job lot for pennies. I’ve watched it happen to other people’s collections more than once.
So I opened mine up instead.
Everything in here has been kept, catalogued and looked after on purpose, the rare stuff, the discontinued runs, and the pieces that never even reached the shops. Preproduction models. Sample playsets that were never sold. Things most collectors have only read about.
