Monday 28 October 2013

The Mystery of the Missing Medieval Building Blocks Manufacturer

Sander's Tudor Stone Building Bricks, box lid
This is an odd one. We have in our collection a Box No.2 of Sander's Tudor Building Bricks. This is a charming (and slightly wobbly) set of building blocks designed to recreate mediaeval European and "Tudor-style" buildings.

However, nobody seems to know who this company "Sander's" are, and the box and literature doesn't seem to be any help. After some detective work, our current best guess is that these sets may have been made specially as promotional items for an Alf Sanders, who built real-life Tudor-style buildings in Hampton Hills, Dallas, Texas.

However, we don't yet have any confirmation that this is really where these sets originated - the combination of Tudor buildings and the Sanders/Sander's branding might be a coincidence.

If anyone out there has more information on these Sander's sets and their origins, we'd love to know more about them - please do get in touch!.

Meanwhile, we've built the model that's on the box lid and front page of the manual, and put it on display.

An assembled Sander's mediaeval building set

1 comment:

  1. Hello, you may have already discovered this, but in case not- here's a bit of information. From trade journal adverts we have Sanders Stone Blocks as manufactured by Franz Sanders Koln-Surth Germany 1911-13, and sold as 'Sanders Renaissance-Steinbaukasten. Sets for the English market seem to be labelled Tudor (or even Todor) We have set 1 in our collection. Hope this is helpful, Deborah Brown -collection information for Trustees of Pollocks Toy Museum.

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