At first this looks like an ordinary building site. The odd thing about it though is that the building is made of Lego, that well-known childrens' toy. It was built as part of the TV series James May's Toy Stories. The idea was to build a house made entirely of Lego. For some reason they chose to build the house in a vineyard near Dorking. It so happened that I was visiting my mother in Dorking every Saturday afternoon, so was able to follow the progress of the house building.
They started by constructing hollow "bricks" out of 272 individual lego bricks. For safety reasons they used a wooden frame and constructed the lego walls around the frame. As the "bricks" were hollow, they went around the wooden supports without touching them, so the lego was in fact self-supporting.
When the house was complete, the presenter James May spent a night in the house including sleeping on a bed made of lego. Unfortunately it was too expensive to move the house, so soon after completion the house was demolished, with the lego being given away to charities.
Until recently this was my most viewed photo, probably because it looked so odd.
Construction took place during August and September 2009. The TV programme was shown in the UK in December 2009. I have a set of photos on Flickr of the construction and demolition (click
here) and on my other blog. Conor's pix (click
here).
The completed building
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James May's Lego House
James May's Toy Stories
James May's Toy Stories - Entire Series [ NON-USA FORMAT, PAL, Reg.2 Import - United Kingdom ]
