Pollock’s Toy Museum

Aimed at both kids and adults, this museum is simultaneously creepy and mesmerising. You walk in through its shop, laden with excellent wooden toys and various games, and start your exploration by climbing up a rickety narrow staircase, where displays begin with framed dolls from Latin America, Africa, India and Europe. Upstairs is the museum’s collection of toy theatres, many made by Benjamin Pollock himself, the leading Victorian manufacturer of the popular sets. Up another set of stairs and you see tin toys and weird-looking dolls in cotton nighties. As you continue on the higgledy-piggledy trail of creaking stairs and floorboards, the dolls follow you with their glazed eyes. After you’ve climbed three flights of stairs, you’ll descend four and, as if by magic, be led back to the shop.