Brickplayer

Brickplayer was a British construction toy made by J. W. Spear & Sons of Enfield in North London from 1938 to the mid-1960s. It was advertised with the claim that realistic buildings could be created "with real bricks and mortar". Early post-war kits were designed to build models to 1:27 scale, but from 1949 they were all designed in the same scale as '0' gauge model railways (1:48 scale), and railway stations and signal boxes regularly featured among the models for which instructions were provided. Over time, the arrival and popularity of 'OO' scale and 'HO' scale railways, particularly in the UK the very popular Hornby Dublo sets, and the easy to use Lego type plastic toys saw it disappear by the mid-1960s.

Kits included large numbers of ceramic or terracotta bricks, the largest of which measured one inch in length, half an inch in depth and 0.25 or 0.22 inches in height. They also provided windows, doors, roofing components and a form of cement, together with instructions for building a selection of pre-designed models. Brickplayer owners could also devise and build their own models, and for several years Spears ran a competition for original models, with prizes for the best ones submitted.

Models were not permanent. Although the 'mortar' (a mixture of flour and chalk) made solid models, they could be deconstructed by soaking in water, and the components used again to build another model. Kits provided enough bricks to build any one of the models in the associated instruction book, but never enough to build all the models simultaneously.

Another popular construction toy of the same era was Bayko. Its models could be built more quickly but were less realistic and the system gave less scope for owners to create original structures.