We built this city

Lego enthusiasts packed out the Hope Hall at the weekend for the Top of the South Brick Show. Reporter Gordon Preece was there to check out all the creations.

A Lego city with no name and a Marvel fling was showcased at the Top of the South Brick Show at the weekend by Motueka couple Bradley Richards and Leah Bullock.

Their design, which featured Marvel’s The Daily Bugle newsroom as the centrepiece, went through an urban expansion using 60,000 Lego pieces for the couple’s second show.

Bradley says the city was a combination of Lego sets he’d collected over several years.

“It’s quite relaxing and fun to build and putting little stories with the mini figures throughout the city is quite cool as well,” he says.

Brightwater father of three Nathan Palmer showcased his Lego haul at the show.

His creations, some which were mechanical, represented the similar “big toys” at his blockbusting workplace Nelson Pine Industries, including a bulldozer, a truck, a crane, a loader, transporter and a log hauler.

Nathan says the Danish building blocks had stacked up since his childhood.

“You don't really lose money on Lego, it's more of an investment, that’s what I tell my wife,” he says.

“There’s a lot of time spent taking into consideration the engineering of it, all the gears, ratios, and how it all works.

“Everybody seems to love it, a lot of the men generate over to [my Lego display] straight away and the kids love it too, anything with movement, they seem to love.”

Jonathan Shepard has been fixated on Lego before the building blocks were available on the New Zealand market.

“I've been interested in Lego since I was eight years old… my parents had some friends that brought Lego from Denmark, you couldn’t buy it in New Zealand at the time, and it built from there,” he says.

Jonathan presented his creation which depicts a castle defending fire-breathing dragons’, with his eight-year-old daughter Jasmine at the show.

“People love it, they enjoy seeing how it's put together because it's hollow… I try and make it easy to transport, so it just clicks together,” he says.

With 20 bins of Lego pieces to his name, Jonathan takes pride in his landscape-based designs being far from run-of-the-mill.

“Last year we did pirate island, with all these pirates trying to get to treasure in a skull cave and the year before that, we made the Encanto house from the movie Encanto,” he says.

“The year before that, we did Elsa’s mountain, a snowy mountain with a castle on it with Arendelle and all that from Frozen and the year before that it was western with cowboys.”