According to the archives, the village was built by a retiree called Edgar Wilson, a man of "humble circumstances". Wilson was a hobbyist who built this sculpture, along with at least two others, in his "little garden" at 70 Hamilton Road, West Norwood, south London. He donated the largest of the four villages to Melbourne, and gave the others to Vauxhall Park, Finsbury Park and Brockwell Park in London. (The model houses in Vauxhall Park were largely rebuilt in 2000-01, and Brockwell Park has just two badly damaged cottages that lie forgotten near a bush inside the park. There is a suggestion that there was also a village in Finsbury Park, north London, but if so it is long gone.)

Andrew Patience, whose company did the restoration work to Melbourne's village, says Wilson used found objects such as bits of brick, coloured glass, ceramics, lead and other materials to make his houses. He thinks Wilson most likely collected his materials from London bomb sites during the blitz; during the restoration process, he found Wilson's signature in the roof of one of the cottages, along with the date November 5, 1945. Wilson would have been 75 at the time the inscription was made.

"It looks to me like Wilson must have had some sort of trade background," Patience says. "Although the work is naive and clumsy, some of it is fairly complicated. But what I really got was a deep sense of the man himself. It's obvious that he'd put his heart and soul into it."