At Coventry’s Brick Festival, Lego is not just child’s play. For many adults, it offers a rare excuse to disappear into something small, slow and satisfyingly complete.
On most weekends at the Coventry Building Society Arena, you would expect the boozy roar of football fans watching Coventry City.
Instead, at this year’s Brick Festival, the concourse was filled with children clutching plastic bags of loose bricks, parents hovering near card machines, and adults inspecting boxed Lego sets that cost more than a weekend away: Millennium Falcons for around £700, the apartments from Friends for £325, rarer sets nudging four figures.
At first glance, it’s what you might expect. A middle-aged man dressed as Jack Sparrow beams with pride, standing next to his recreation of the Black Pearl.
Nearby, a quieter man divulges on the process behind his red knee-high gorilla with its fist in the air. There are life-sized blue marlin sculptures and grown men dressed in minifigure costumes.
The hall is split into three sections. There are the building tables with children crouched over them, brows furrowed, creating whatever their invention their minds dream up. Then the vendors, with kits ranging from kids’ sets for £30 to enormous, highly technical sets valued at up to £800.
But the centre of the hall belonged to the adults. Not just collectors or people following instruction manuals, but highly talented builders.
Peter Goodwin stood behind a mechanical Lego train he had made himself. It had no instructions. It was made from unrelated pieces, fitted and refitted until a button sent it running around a track of roughly two metres. He began making steam engines after his love for steam engines emerged years ago.
“I started making trains, and then carried on from there, making more and more trains.” But he had never stopped building. In Lego culture, he explained, a “dark age” is the period in which someone stops playing Lego. Peter had no “dark age”.
Lego, for Peter, is not a cute relapse into childhood. “I’m dyslexic,” he said, “so I actually like having a hobby which has no words in it. I’m very visual.” Building, he added, makes him feel “happy, relaxed”. He likes the community, but he also likes the private logic of it: the way a thing slowly becomes itself.
A few tables away, Andy Clay, 68, a retired juggler, had built a little corner of San Francisco: four pastel houses, streets, tiny residents, cars, rooms with openings revealing beds with duvets impressively constructed by hard plastic bricks.
It was only about a metre square, but had the density of a neighbourhood. “Lockdown was the thing that got me into Lego,” he said. “It’s a nice substitute for performing.”
Clay’s pleasure comes from the problem-solving element that Lego offers. “How can I make, out of three or four bricks – because it’s got to be to scale – something that’s going to work?” he said.
He pointed out his favourite detail to me: the duvets, made from “solid, lumpy bricks.” The trick was colour, roundness, proportion. “That is just as much an achievement as building a three-storey building.”
This, according to Dr Nic Gibson, a senior lecturer in psychology at Anglia Ruskin University who specialises in adult playfulness, is absolutely play.
“Play is any activity that is engaged in for its own sake,” they told me. And Lego is even more interesting because it is “multimodal”: tactile, visual, creative, structured, sometimes social, sometimes solitary. “You get a physical object, but also a sense of achievement attached to it. You did that!”
That sense of accomplishment is something that kept cropping up in the Lego world. Tim*, a senior NHS figure who picked up Lego during Covid, described it as a “contained sense of achievement.”
Adult work, he said, can take a long time to come to fruition. Lego has “a beginning and an endpoint.” You sit down, build the thing, and there it is.
“Spending the time quietly doing something in a busy, stressful world is probably quite powerful,” Tim said. If he stopped tomorrow, what would he miss? “The quiet time; the space it gives you to just be quiet and present.”
Yet, the stigma still lingers. He admitted that he doesn’t tell too many people he builds Lego. “That is an answer in itself… There will be judgment with it. Like, that’s a kid’s thing, or it’s a bit nerdy.”
Dr Sarah Hodge, who lectures in cyberpsychology, looking specifically at gaming and the idea of nostalgia, sees the same problem more broadly. “There’s almost a stigma around play for adults,” she said. “Do they even play?”
But adults play constantly; it’s just more disguised. It can be seen in sports, video games, drinking, scrolling, flirting, and pub quizzes. The thing with Lego is that it looks like a toy.
Kevin Chapman, co-creator of YouTube channel Block Party, calls it “a great analogue hobby,” especially for people who spend all day on screens. Building lets the brain “shut off and slow down.”
At the Brick Festival, slowing down was everywhere: in Peter’s train looping patiently around its track; in Clay’s Lego duvet; in children and retirees leaning over the building tables; in adults giving themselves permission, for a morning, to do something with no obvious productive purpose.
So perhaps the strangest thing, in the end, is not that adults are playing Lego.
It’s that more of us aren’t.
*Names and identifying details have been changed to protect anonymity.
Featured image by Tony Ball.