Category:Vanguards

Packaging, Lotus Cortina MkII Police Car [image info]

The Vanguard range of model cars seems to have been motivated by the realisation that ... years after the effective decease of major British diecast toy manufacturers like Dinky Toys, who had optimistically tried to model new British car models when they came out, there was there were now lots of well-known British vehicles that had never been modelled by anybody, leading to a certain amount of pent-up demand. Which Lledo were happy to then satisfy.

Distinctly different

The Vanguard range was so different to Lledo's "Days Gone" range that Corgi probably made the right decision when they took over the brand of losing the Lledo link and treating them as two totally different concepts ... which they were.

Where Days Gone were intended to be cheap "old fashioned" looking cars aimed at collectors and at kids who didn't care too much about accuracy, the Vanguard range were much larger, 1:43 -scale quality models of cars that often sold to people who had owned the actual cars in question, and for whom owning an affordable but really good replica was a way of triggering happy memories of, say, their first car, or of certain distinctive periods in their life that were demarcated by the car that they happened to drive at the time.

Detail

The Vanguard models have a reputation for getting all the details and the "feel" of their cars exactly right, which tends to trigger a response in people who grew up walking past these cars every days of their lives, or who actually owned them.

Since this was the period of British Leyland, when second-hand cars were cheap and tended to wear out quickly, many people at the time would have owned a range of cars in a ten-year period, including several that would then inevitably be in the Vanguard range.

It's probably not too much of an exaggeration to say that Vanguard brand have produced some wonderful models of some really awful cars!

The brand's "niche" is unusual in that buyers often aren't especially into diecast cars per se, or consider themselves to be "collectors" interested in a particular toy brand ... they simply want a model of the first car they drove, and having managed that (and been very happy with the result), perhaps then start looking out for models of all the other cars they've owned since. It's nostalgia, but personal, informed nostalgia. And since the big US toymakers are unlikely to produce a lovingly-crafted model of a boxy Austin Allegro or a "boy racer's" UK Ford Capri, what they end up buying is something from the Vanguard range.

In the museum

Since the dates of production of Vanguards (still a current range) are just so far out of our normal Museum date-range and collection remit, we don't have a display collection. However, since the subject matter is very British, and lies just outside our date-range, we thought that the brand deserves to be listed.

External links

• Vanguards models, on the Corgi website (corgi.co.uk)