AS A CHILD, MY FAVOURITE toy was not a high-concept branded product, but a simple wooden frame with a hinged door that my father made for me. It does not matter that it was, to be honest, not made terribly well, because it was not meant to replicate anything specific. Instead, it was a primitive intuition enhancer. With this frame and its door I could turn a sofa into a submarine with its hatches. Placed on carpet or against a wall, it offered the beguiling mystery of a secret trapdoor. I found it endlessly fascinating. I suppose it may have helped that I always had a perfervid imagination, but – on the other hand – I think that this little frame actually helped me to develop it.

At the time I had, of course, no idea that I was participating in the type of creative experiment that linked early 19th-century German educational theory to the architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright, the Bauhaus, to main-stream modernism in the 20th century and, nowadays, to the consumer’s fascination with four-wheel-drives (with their extrinsically ludic quality) and the iPod (which excites almost helplessly tactile cupidity among adults in the way that desirable toys used to with children).

The role of play in creativity was systematically studied by Friedrich Froebel, who believed that “children are like tiny flowers” and, extending the metaphor, gave us the kindergarten. And, in the 1830s, Froebel developed a system of solid shapes suspended on string that the inquisitive child could examine from different angles, make interesting formal juxtapositions, enhancing his or her spatial awareness the while. Originally a cube, sphere and cylinder, these “Froebel blocks” were later adapted (as a primary coloured cube, sphere, and cone) as a logo for the influential Bauhaus.

The Bauhaus educational method depended on learning by doing: students were encouraged to manipulate, for example, feathers and wood. And the modernist insistence on getting to the essence of things was itself founded in another aspect of German educational theory, the concept of Hauptformen, or using drawing to determine the absolute. Plato had singled out the same shapes as Froebel and the Bauhaus: the Platonic forms. An Ur-connection with Modernism was enhanced when the Prussian Government banned kindergartens on suspicions of socialism and atheism.

When these Froebel blocks crossed the Atlantic they became a significant influence on the architect Frank Lloyd Wright, who said that they helped him to appreciate how “form became feeling”.

In his autobiography, Wright explained that “these primary forms and figures were the secret of all effects which were ever got into the architecture of the world”. Quite so.

My own son never much cared for model trains or cars; my daughter was dismissive of dolls. Their favourite toy was a huge set of beautifully finished wooden geometrical shapes we had made for them. With these they could assemble conceptually daring and structurally improbable models of . . . absolutely anything.

The great Dutch cultural historian Johan Huizinga published Homo Ludensin 1938. Here he explained the quintessentially creative character of play. Never mind that for Anglo-Saxon male children of a certain generation, play was almost always exclusively associated with destructive warfare, playing wargames helped to establish concepts of fairness and of cheating, while encouraging strategic thinking. “Let my play be my learning and my learning be my play,” Huizinga wrote.

In this century, designers have often used toys as cultural markers, either in the breach or the observance. The General Motors designer Bill Mitchell said: “Look at a smooth billiard ball and a baseball with its interesting stitching. Which one do you instinctively pick up and play with?” He said it was the fascinating baseball quality he wanted to get into an Oldsmobile Tornado or a Chevrolet Corvette.

On the other hand, Charles Eames, the American architect and designer, told Interiors magazine: “I visited a good toy store this morning . . . it was sick-making. I longed for the desert, even though quite a few of the things in other times would have been treasures . . . Affluence offers the kind of freedom I am deeply suspicious of. It offers freedom from restraint, and virtually it is impossible to do anything without restraints.”

A different view was taken by Eames’s colleague at the Herman Miller furniture company, the textile designer, Alexander Girard. Describing the glum environment of the Fifties, Girard said “people got fainting fits if they saw bright, pure colour”. Girard found inspiration in toys and folk art and built a vast collection (now in the Santa Fe Museum of International Folk Art). But toys have also had a more prescriptive influence, as an elegiac new book on the rise and fall of the Meccano empire explains.

The businessman Frank Hornby, from Liverpool, registered the name “Meccano” in September, 1907. Beginning as kitchen-table improvisation with biscuit tins, Meccano became “engineering in miniature”: a collection of metal components from those innocent days when a toy manufacturer could believe that his juvenile clients were actually interested in gears, clutches, drive-changes, belts, trunnions, pulleys and levers.

I had a Meccano set and hated it, reserving special loathing for its fish-plates, annoying bevels, scratchy red-and-green panels and nuts that I was forever cross-threading.

But through the mid-20th century Meccano flourished. It had its own magazine, an early example of cross-marketing. The edition for May 1935 presented children with an illustration of a giant valve for the new Niagara dam, a proud engineer to the fore.

Emulation was the aim. Meccano was joined by Hornby model trains. I can remember now the horrible smell of my electric trainset, the sparky connections, the continuously overheating transformer and the ionised air in a stuffy suburban drawing room. I did not enjoy the fag nor see the point of trainsets. But Hornby also created Dinky vehicles, giving his firm a trinity of wish-fulfilment toys. There are photographs of shortsighted, turbanned, working-class women diligently assembling, pop-riveting and spray-painting model Bedford trucks for . . . me.

How odd that a business founded on construction principles should become a metaphor for national economic collapse. When Meccano bought a plastic company called Bayko, specialising in building sets, it sold sets of plastic bricks that, with tragic provincialism, it wanted children to make into model semidetached houses. More progressively, and with far better technology, the Danish LEGO company made its own plastic bricks into a subtle and sophisticated modular system with limitless possibilities, setting the imagination free. LEGO is, significantly, a contraction of the Danish words for “play well”. By 1979 the Meccano companies, once among the biggest toy-makers in the world, were bankrupt.

But all toys have had difficulty surviving the competitive culture of consumerism, True, in 1961, an old-established educational supplier called James Galt opened a shop on Carnaby Street and published a fine catalogue in bold sans serif with dramatic photo cut-outs.

Designed by Ken Garland, its style predicted Habitat by three years. Galt sold educational toys of high quality and high integrity. Unfortunately, long before children were beguiled by corrupting electronics, they were disappointed by its wholesomeness. Just as Meccano went into decline as pop culture advanced, Galt suffered a falling off, although it continues to satisfy children from nought to ten today.

And toys today? In the way they excite the desire to touch, feel and consume; in the way they expand the banal moment (on the bus or on the M25) into an imaginative adventure, the beautiful MP3 and the chunky SUV are our playthings. And do you know what their designers had on their desks? Very likely, Froebel blocks. Not high-concept branded products.

FACTORY OF DREAMS: A History of Meccano Ltd, 1901-1979 by Kenneth D. Brown

Crucible Books, £20; 240pp

Buy the book here at the offer price of £18 (free p&p)

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