Much-loved Rushden toy shop celebrates 70th anniversary in the High Street with special display through the decades

Osborne’s Toys has been a mainstay in Rushden since May 1955, with generations of the Osborne family taking on the responsibility of tending the now-beloved shop.

The anniversary will be marked today (Saturday, May 3) with ‘balloons, cakes, one day only discounts and other amazing surprises’, which people are invited to attend and enjoy from 9.30am.

Jim Osborne, Will’s father, opened the shop all those years ago with his wife, Pamela, who sadly passed away in 2024. The shop has since been stewarded by Will, his daughter, Anna, and his granddaughter, Kasey. 70 years later it’s still going strong, with the owners of the shop insisting that consistency is key.

Will Osborne said: “Kids really stay the same, if you give a kid a toy and turn away, they’ll be playing with it. There’s just something about the draw of toys.

“We sell the latest things but we don’t slavishly follow the trends, we’re a traditional shop, when customers come in here they know what they’re going to find.

"I don’t think customers would like it if I uprooted and made it completely different, they want it the same as it was the last time they came in, even if it was 20 years ago. They want to come in and have the same feeling.

"As long as we stick to our principles, we’ll still be here.”

Jim Osborne had a toy archive from when he opened the shop in the mid-1950s and through the years, and so the idea came about to decorate each window with toys and memorabilia from each decade, from a rocking horse and Hornby train set in the 50s, to Buzz Lightyear and Cindy in the 1990s.

Will added: “We thought we’d do a window from each decade with the idea that when people come down and look in the window they recognise something they had or wanted, or a Christmas present they forgot about, it’s all nostalgia and memories.

“You never remember where your first washing machine came from.

“It’s a nice thing that we can do, if you look at the window three times you see something different three times.

“Toy shops should be happy places.”

Rushden’s High Street has changed a lot over the last few years and decades, but Osborne’s has managed to stay consistent despite some of the challenges that town centres across the country have had to endure.

Kasey Osborne said: "“As the High Street changes we’re always going to be impacted, but we’ve been here for so long that we’re now the shop that people will come to the High Street for.”

Osborne’s has served customers of all ages for seven decades, and now some families are in their third or fourth generation, bringing their children to the shop as their parents did for them all those years ago.

Finally, Kasey added: “We just had a lady come in who had the horse we have in the window in the 1950s and said ‘oh I had that as a little girl!’, and you could see the little girl she was.”