Collection: W.Britain World War I Toy Soldiers

This is W. Britain's World War I range: both sides of the Great War in 1/30 scale metal, from the outbreak in 1914 to the last hundred days of 1918. Aces and generals, doughboys and stormtroopers, a field kitchen and a dogcart, the men who dug the trenches and the men carried back out of them. The war is sculpted as it was — the machine guns and the wire, the gas satchels, the mud — without dressing it up. The Allied Powers and the Central Powers are both here, because the fight needs two sides.

Everything in this collection is built to one standard: 1/30 scale — roughly 60mm — matte-painted metal, on sculpted groundwork bases. That matters if you build dioramas. Because it all shares a scale, a finish and a base treatment, any figure here stands convincingly beside any other, German or Allied, in the same scene. The one caveat is that this compatibility stops at the W. Britain range: the 54mm gloss Tradition of London and Regal figures elsewhere in the store are a different size on flat bases, and won't share a base with these.

New to it? The air war is the easy way in — Manfred von Richthofen against Billy Bishop and Eddie Rickenbacker, the most recognised names of 1914–18. The U.S. Marines at Belleau Wood are a self-contained set that builds into a single fight. The trench sections are the stage everything else stands on. Every figure is sold individually, so a collection can begin with one man and grow into an army.

A W. Britain 1/30 scale World War I diorama: khaki-clad Allied infantry in Brodie helmets manning a sandbagged trench.