MAYBE it really is their sheer lack of size; the delight of seeing St Paul’s Cathedral or Stonehenge on a scale of 1:24 or 1:9 and being three years old but taller than Big Ben.

Or perhaps it’s the timewarp, most model villages in the UK, including the model town at Wimborne, re-create the high-street and atmosphere of the 1950s. But could it go deeper than that?

Although they were said to have been invented during the 19th century, built on private property to satisfy the whims of the rich, most model villages got going during the 1920s and onwards. The era, in fact, following the most terrible conflict the world had ever seen.

Might those who came to stop and stare at these perfect re-creations of an ideal life have suffered all too horribly in the real world of the trenches and the gunfire of World War I?

Manager of Wimborne Model Town, Stuart Bevan, believes they did.

“Absolutely, I think many of the visitors were just glad to gaze on a peaceful, perfect scene which must have been a big contrast to what they had witnessed” he says.

He believes the sheer harmlessness of model villages is part of their charm and, he says this held true for Wimborne Model Town – which is an exact re-creation of the real Wimborne during the 1950s.

“Again it was post war and that may have been part of its attraction,” he says.

Now the village is enjoyed by all generations.

“It’s on a scale of 1:10 so you can walk the streets. It’s great to see the children puzzling over phone numbers which say Wimborne 29 or over noticeboards with the old money written on them.

They’ll ask their grandparents about that and it bridges the generations.”

Wimborne Model Town has fared better than Tucktonia on Stour Road, subject of the Red House film, which opened to a blaze of publicity in 1976.

The site boasted 200 buildings over four acres on a scale of 1:24 representing what the owners said was 4,000 years of British heritage.

Every year a new delight was added, modern contrivances such as a hovercraft and hoverport, a North Sea Oil rig with its fire being put out and a model of Britain’s tallest building, the NatWest tower.

Enthralled children could watch Concorde taxi-ing up and down its runway and hear choir music warbling from St George’s chapel. Bagpipes played in the Highlands and sea-gulls screeched over the Cornish fishing village.

This excess of whimsy attracted a surprising number of celebrities including Worzel Gummidge star Jon Pertwee, Multi-Coloured Swap-Shop supremos Keith Chegwin and Maggie Philbin, and legendary comic Tommy Cooper.

But all good things come to an end and so did Tucktonia. It was closed in 1986 and sold off to a developer. Its little buildings, said to be worth £1million, were stored in a Verwood warehouse but many were destroyed during a fire in 1990 although Buckingham Palace escaped.

But there are plenty of other model villages in the UK, the world, even, to go to.

There’s Bekonscot in Buckinghamshire and further afield there is Klagenfurt in Austria, Lilliputhammer in Norway, and Kyviv in the Ukraine.

In Japan there’s Tobu World and in Durban, South Africa is Mini-Town. And there’s even a Mini Israel.