Sometimes life is a little strange - one day last week a chap at work was talking to me over lunch about toys when we were young and one of the the things he mentioned was Bayko, a building system that I always enjoyed playing with. It was tiles of different colours that slid down copper rods that were put into the baseplate and the house I built with mine and then knocked down to start again was really good. Imaging our surprise when on Friday night there was an article in the Express and Star (local evening paper) about Bayko and wow were there some interesting buildings in that article?
The other building system we talked about was Betta Builda which was similar to Lego but never really seemed to catch on and I have to be honest very few people seem to remember it so I was pleased to find somebody else who did.
Well better stop reminiscing as its time to get ready for work!
Interrupting the radio silence…
4 months ago
I had Betta Builda as a kid and alway thought it was better than lego at the time. It was hard to get and I got frustrated that it wouldn't fit together with my lego bits.
ReplyDeleteI liked it because the main brick block was shaped like a real brick with only two segments and was more refined than the equivalent lego brick and was coloured white. However, the core lego block was double thickness and usually with six or eight segments.
My father was in the building trade so I used to enjoy building real cavity walls and experimenting with different types of bonds english, flemish, stretcher and so on. How sad is that.
In fact, to this day, I find real brick laying to be quite a therapuetic and absorbing past time.
Thanks for taking me down this little bit of childhood memory lane which I'd completely forgotten. I think there may be an old leather suitcase in the attic somewhere with some Builda bricks, must dig it out...
Mark
Hi Mark,
ReplyDeleteThanks for the comment - I really did feel that I was the only person who knew about Betta Builda as often if mentioned in company in my age group there would be almost glazed expressions. I have to say as well as your comments about the bricks I always liked the roof tiles because they looked extremely realistic, although they were a tad fiddly to put together.