Big Game Hunters

It began with a birthday party and a very small tower game

One of the directors had twins, a birthday party looming, and a garden full of adults and children who all needed entertaining at once. He looked at the little wooden tower game the children liked and had the thought that occurs to almost nobody: this would be better if it were enormous. He built one. It was finished just in time for the party, which by his wife's account was a relief to everybody concerned.

That tower became Hi-Tower, and Hi-Tower became a business in the Oxfordshire countryside. Twenty years on they design and manufacture garden games of the sort that end a summer afternoon rather than filling five minutes of it: giant chess, croquet, boules, rounders, connect four scaled up until it needs two people to reset it. The proper heavy wooden ones, made to be left out on the lawn and dragged back in when somebody remembers.

They call themselves the play experts, which sounds like the kind of thing a marketing department invents and is in this case simply what happens when a company spends two decades doing one thing. There is now school playground equipment, sports kit and playhouses alongside the garden games, all of it built on the same principle: it must survive being played with by children, which is a considerably higher standard than surviving being looked at by adults.

They sit among our other British makers, which is where to go if you like knowing whose idea a thing was. Have a browse.