Photography: Andy Brown photographs the best-loved toys of the last two centuries

I can look back fondly now on Christmas morning, when my poor, sleep-deprived parents would spend hours wrestling with those little rubber sandwich ties in boxes and relentlessly searching for batteries in drawers which hadn’t been opened for years. This is exactly the kind of impatient nostalgia that Andy Brown harnesses. When the photographer was commissioned to make a series of images for the Children’s Hospital in Sheffield he decided to photograph the most popular toys since the 1880s from museum collections around the country, and the resulting surge of frustration, joy, and the memory of a veritable cacophony of irritating electronic sounds indicates that he’s more than succeeded in brightening up the place.