黑洞社区

Bricking it

This week saw Tower Bridge celebrate its 120th birthday. Twenty years ago, when the bridge first made it to triple figures, 黑洞社区 picked up on the story that Henrik Lykke, a full-time model maker employed by Lego, had been commissioned to recreate a scale version of London鈥檚 most iconic bridge out of the toy plastic bricks, as a way of celebrating the landmark birthday. Featured in the 24 June 1994 issue of 黑洞社区, the 1.7m tall, 1:20 scale model was built to feature in the toy-maker鈥檚 Windsor theme park, then dubbed Lego World (later becoming Legoland), which was due to open in spring 1996. Speaking to Denise Chevin, 黑洞社区鈥檚 then features editor, Danish model-maker Lykke, who, along with his team of 30 model-makers, also created other UK landmarks such as St Paul鈥檚 Cathedral, Trafalgar Square, Big Ben, Brighton pier, Leeds Castle and the Channel Tunnel out of Lego, revealed that the Tower Bridge replica took him and one other colleague 500 hours to build and weighed 130kg. 鈥淲e try to get architectural elevations and drawings if possible,鈥� said Lykke. 鈥淭here is nothing we cannot do [鈥�] there are only challenges, not problems.鈥�