The Toy Story: the life and times of inventor Frank Hornby Anthony McReavy Ebury Press, 288pp, £17.99 ISBN 009188117X

At school, I had a friend called Peter. He lived in a house larger than ours to the tune of one boxroom, and I was jealous of him on account of this room. Ostensibly, it was six foot by four, but, metaphorically, it contained a whole universe - by which I mean a Hornby train layout, on which Peter and his dad conducted what they gleefully called "operations". Peter had Meccano as well: those with model trains generally did.

One day, in 1916, when he was ten years old, and his parents were out, Roye England - who would go on to found the Pendon Museum in Long Wittenham, Oxfordshire, and become the greatest railway model maker of all time - made a model of the Forth Suspension Bridge in Meccano. It was 16 foot long. Meccano and Hornby survive as brand names, but the mindset behind them is long lost. It arose, writes Anthony McReavy, out of a climate in which industrial triumphalism had created the view that "play is the work of childhood". This, unselfconsciously married to pursuit of his own enrichment, was the guiding principle of Frank Hornby, who created not only Meccano and Hornby trains, but also Dinky Toys.

Not much is known of Hornby. But you soon become confident, reading McReavy's elegant, considered prose, that everything there is to know about him has been included here. Hornby was born in 1863, a member of the upstanding Liverpool working classes. He became a meat importer's clerk, and spare-time engineer, who tried to discover perpetual motion in his garden shed. Meccano was patented in 1901. The arrival of Hornby trains, 20 years later, was inevitable. The Meccano Boy - iconically depicted in the pages of Meccano Magazine - was often shown knocking off a quick locomotive. Meccano had been inspired by Hornby's love of the cranes that unloaded the trains at Liverpool's docks. The toys were world beaters; by the mid-1920s, toyshop posters stated simply: "These are Meccano days".

Hornby looked like Otto von Bismarck, his moustache waxed to lethal points. He liked big cigars, had a chauffeur called Tatler and seems to have been a workaholic. Yet he was popular among the workers at his Liverpool factory, and he liked dancing. It is a shame that we cannot have more about this, because it is very hard to imagine any user of Meccano dancing, let alone its begetter.

In 1931, Hornby became Tory MP for Everton, and proposed a private bill allowing the Christmas shopping season to be extended so children could "inspect the British-made goods and materials of a scientific nature for after-school occupations" - that is to say, Meccano. But he never got around to introducing it. He died in 1936, by which time his products were losing out to glamourised toys such as Micky Mouse figures, although it was a another practical toy that really upstaged Meccano, albeit one of greater simplicity and unisexuality: Lego, which was patented in 1958.

Hornby's legacy might make a book in itself. Manchester University's differential analyser was built of Meccano in the 1930s. Meccano boys found their way to the British Aircraft Corporation, the Atomic Weapons Research Establishment and other such institutions. Meccano was used to prototype the Mini, and it influenced the design of the London Eye. A more grandiose writer than McReavy would have made more of all this, but it is good to find a biographer who lets his subject's claims to fame speak for themselves.

Andrew Martin's new novel, The Necropolis Railway, is published by Faber and Faber in August

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