Hamleys - Games, Arts, Crafts, Interactive, Outdoor, Sports, Preschool, Soft Toys.

Come and visit our exciting NEW website and choose from thousands of the latest toys, including all your favourite brands as well as our own Hamleys collection, our quick and easy website takes the hassle out of shopping, our Regent St experience has all the magic of Hamleys including competitions and a fun monthly newsletter. Welcome to the home of the finest toys in the world!


	When William Hamley first opened a toy shop in London, Westminster Bridge had just opened to traffic - horses and carts. Even gas lights would not illuminate the city's streets for another half a century. The year was 1760, but William Hamley, a Cornishman from Bodmin, was not put off. He filled his cramped Holborn shop with every toy he could find; rag dolls and tin soldiers, hoops and wooden horses, because he wanted the finest toy shop in the world. He even called it the 'Noah's Ark'. So when Henry Charles Harrod opened a small grocer's in Knightsbridge in 1849, Hamleys was already a vastly successful 'Joy Emporium'. To celebrate, in 1881, William Hamley's grandsons opened a new branch in Regent Street, not far from Piccadilly Circus. Hamleys was here 11 years before Eros. By the end of Queen Victoria's reign, croquet sets, cricket bats and 'footballs for playing on the sands', jostled with marionettes, magic lanterns and model sailing boats on the shop's packed shelves. So great had the shop's reputation now become that Jean Jaques and Sons asked if they could launch their new 'Gossima' exclusively through Hamleys. The public immediately took to the game which they christened 'ping pong' after the noise made by the bouncing of its hollow white celluloid ball. Not until 1921 did it officially become Table Tennis. In the same year, Hamleys reopened on six floors. Now toy theatres, Punch and Judy puppets, pedal cars and miniature railway trains helped to fill what was 'the largest toy shop in the world'. Ironically, this desire to provide the world's best selection of toys and games finally threatened to close Hamleys altogether. Its fleet of horse drawn delivery vans were still at work each day when the economic depression across Europe forced the shop into liquidation in 1931. Hamleys was saved by a man who had ridden on the delivery vans as a boy, Walter Lines chairman of the Tri-Ang company, who bought it and rebuilt its reputation. In 1938 he was rewarded with the Royal Warrant from Queen Mary. Her granddaughters, the young Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret Rose, both had Hamleys toys in their nursery. Even being bombed five times in the blitz did not stop Hamleys. The staff wearing tin hats served at the front door, rushing in to collect the toys, and hand them over at the door. After the War it was business as usual; the Festival of Britain in 1951 brought a Grand Doll’s Salon as well as a vast model railway to hypnotise children of any age. The new Queen Elizabeth II had not forgotten her own childhood companions. Both Prince Charles and Princess Anne received toys from Hamleys and, in 1955, her Majesty honoured Walter Lines with his second Royal Warrant as a ‘Toys and Sports Merchant’.

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Hamleys.

Games, Arts, Crafts, Interactive, Outdoor, Sports, Preschool, Soft Toys.