What Happened to Dinky Toys? How Britain's Toy Car Empire Vanished

What happened to Dinky Toys? Once, Britain built the greatest toy car empire in the world inside a single Liverpool factory on Binns Road — and then let it vanish without a trace. This is the true story of how Dinky Toys rose, ruled the bedrooms of children across Britain and the Commonwealth, and was destroyed not by cheap foreign competition, but by a British company that bought it almost by accident. From Frank Hornby, a Liverpool bookkeeper who borrowed five pounds to patent Meccano in 1901, to the golden age of Dinky Supertoys, Thunderbirds models, and FAB 1 — to the collapse of Lines Bros in 1971, the takeover by Airfix, and the final, brutal closure of the Binns Road factory in November 1979 with just twenty minutes' notice. 943 people lost their jobs. The women who built these toys occupied the factory for fourteen weeks before bailiffs and thirty police officers took it back. This is the real mechanism behind what Britain lost — and who decided to let it go.