SOME classifieds from the August issue of Collectors Gazette: "Batman items wanted, 1966-79...Retired couple want to sell collection of Avon bubble bath containers...Rod Hull Emu puppet with pink body wanted...Robertson's golly items wanted, high prices paid...I love Bayko building sets..."

Child's play they may be, but there's nothing small-time about the burgeoning toy market.

Vectis Auctions turned over £5m on old toys last year and expects to double the figure by 2005. "Everyone's had toys; there's a relationship and a stimulus about them," says Vectis boss Bryan Goodall, 54, the new Mr Big in that mesmerically miniature world.

Toys, it might be said, are very definitely him - and there are few knock- down prices at toy auctions.

He was born in Middlesbrough, his father a credit company owner. In 1975, Bryan and his wife Jeannie began Heritage Hampers from the kitchen table of their home in Marton and were filling over 300,000 annually - almost exclusively for the Christmas market - when they sold the company in 1994.

They'd reached a plateau, he says. The new owner bought the company but not the floor space, leaving him with almost 250,000 square feet of warehousing on an industrial estate in Thornaby.

"I honestly had no idea what the next move was, but I had to think of a way of filling those warehouses," he says.

Jeannie provided unwitting inspiration. "She was clearing out the drawer in the dining room one day when she came across 20 or 30 of the old Dinky and Corgi toys which I'd had since I was a kid.

"We'd moved house seven times and they'd just gone through the system; I hadn't seen them for 20 years. They were scrappy toys because I was a normal kid and played with them, but it just seemed to trigger something." He loved Bayko building sets, too.

The professional term is collectables. Bryan Goodall, now owner of toy auction houses in both Britain and America, of the Collectors Gazette and of a sumptuous Santa's grotto among private museums - is himself a veritable collector's item.

It began, he insists, as a hobby. Within a year it was a time consuming and lucrative full-time business; the warehouses were filling up fast.

He'd discovered Vectis, an Isle of Wight-based business with an auction room in Guildford, and became a regular bidder - frequently spending £10,000 a time for his personal collection.

"I got hooked, it was as simple as that. Jeannie thought I was crazy but I dragged her down once and she discovered it was a nice little business," he says. In 1996, he bought the company, his wife the only other director.

He denies, however, that it was a case of a successful businessman regressing to a second childhood, but says it was rather a hard-nosed entrepreneur looking solely to the future. Vectis now owns auction houses in Thornaby, Buckingham, Rugby and Pennsylvania, plans acquisitions in Europe and has completed a deal to take over all Sotheby's toy sales.

The reception area has several cabinets full of toys - everything, it's explained, is for sale - and several prints of the vastly successful South Bank-born artist Mackenzie Thorpe. Goodall also has around 50 Thorpe originals.

Beyond the foyer are vast warehouses rich with memories of childhood, like a history of Hamley's shop windows. There's the doll and teddy room, the diecast and tinplate room, the fort and toy soldier room, the model train room - and each room's the size of half a football field.

There's an original Dalek, unexterminated, a seven-twelfths scale Morgan sports car just sold for £3,600 - "a Dinky could bring as much," says Bryan and frequently they do - and a vast array of tinplate treasures.

"Bloody hell," we exclaim, involuntarily, upon entering.

"Lots of people say that," says one of the resident experts, as manifestly happy at his task as a palaeontologist in the British Museum.

The "private museum", the sanctuary to which Bryan retreats if things get bloody downstairs, is yet more extraordinary. Even Jeannie hadn't been up there for ages.

"She says I'm spending, I say I'm investing. It depends upon how you look at it but I can still open a box and think 'Wow'," says Bryan. Most will be sold when he retires.

There's a first edition of The Beano, Big Eggo on the cover and probably worth £4,000, a flotilla of tinplate ships, several regiments of plastic soldiers - "you could have bought one for a shilling and pay £1,000 now" - the world's best collection of Tri-ang Spot-On models and the beginnings of a venerable teddy bears' picnic, an investment for his ten-month-old granddaughter Amelia.

His particular pride, however, is an extraordinary two-by-two of Victorian Noah's Arks, made mainly in Germany. They were known as Sunday toys, alone deemed fitting Sabbath playthings for the well brought up young.

Whether ark gallery or art gallery, it neatly fits his theme. "Rich collectors can have their Monets and their Picassos, their grand clocks and their furniture," says Bryan.

"Lots of individuals attend our sales to buy just one or two small items because they're fuelled by nostalgia. There are also dealers who hope to fuel their nostalgia later."

Yesterday's auction, a single collection amassed by a chap in Kent, was expected to raise over £50,000 for his widow.

Aided by the Internet, Bryan expects the boom to continue. He contemplates a branch line into railwayana ("huge") and leafing into children's books. "There'll always be a childhood connection," he says. The toy joys are for ever.

MEMORIES of Page Bank continue, as it were, to flood in. They talked of little else during the tea break at the county cricket last Friday; now there's an e-mail from Mona Walker in Newcastle, New South Wales.

Page Bank, it will be recalled, is the former pit village near Spennymoor which was all but washed away when the Wear burst its banks in November 1967.

Mona, sent the column by her brother Eric Shields in Billingham, was brought up there before the war. She remembers the village school and the British Legion hut, the WI plays, the processions through the village when all the bairns had a candle in a jam jar, the diphtheria and scarlet fever outbreaks, the good times and the sad.

There was also the time when she fell down the netty and had to be rescued by her father - but that, as they say, is probably another story.

LAST week's note on Tyne Tees Television producer Arthur Pickering's Pies-Are-Squared website - chiefly devoted to the unalloyed joys of the growler - failed to acknowledge his ancestry.

His dad, it transpires, was a butcher in Elwick Road, Hartlepool. "He sold the best pork pies I've ever eaten in my life," says Maurice Heslop, from Billingham.

"I suppose it's in the blood," says Arthur, whose father died in 1970.

Sunderland football fan Paul Dobson also reports discovering the world's finest pies - at Kilmarnock football ground, of all places, before last Saturday's friendly.

Growlers? "Oh aye," says Paul. "These pies bite."

....and finally, a note arrives from the indefatigable Harry Whitton in Thirsk, from time to time teased hereabouts for his tendency towards name- dropping. The Queen Mother and the Earl of Dalkeith warrant inclusion in this one.

The retired electrical dealer is 84, has given 144 after dinner speeches and five at lunchtime gatherings and adds to that list this afternoon, when he speaks at Leyburn Ladies' Probus.

The talk's called "No strangers in my life, only friends I have yet to meet."

The names, says Harry, will drop like rainwater from a pair of wellingtons.