- Created from over 277,500 bricks
- It was built by 41 team members in total
- It measures over four metres tall
- and 16 metres wide
- It took 639 man-hours to build
- The total weight of the bricks is 610kg
Just before Christmas (2017) we received a phone call from a public relations company in London called "Mischief". They introduced themselves as the P.R. Company for Lego, and wanted to discuss an idea they'd had with us.
Apparently, January 28th 2018 was the 60th Anniversary of the patenting of the first Lego brick and to celebrate this they wanted to organise for our shop to be made out of Lego. The reason for this, they explained, was that Lego had checked their records and discovered that we were the first shop in the U.K. to sign up as a Lego stockist. We agreed to the plan and a week or so later a man came from Lego's Big Build facility in the Czech Republic to take some photos and measurements.
After chatting to him for a while, we asked what the model would look like - how big, etc. "Oh, no!" he said, "it's not a model; we're going to clad the whole shop from in Lego, life-size, to look exactly as it does now." We were staggered, but true to their word, on January 24th a lorry arrived with all the pre-built sections, and by the end of the following day (11:15pm on the Thursday night) they had finished the build. It looked impressive on the Thursday night in the dark - but even better in the daylight on the Friday morning.
So, on Friday morning, about 7.30, all the media started to arrive. BBC, ITV, Channel 5, Sky News, Radio Northampton, Heart FM, the Evening Telgraph, et al. My mother and I spent all morning doing interviews. Word spread like wildfire on Facebook and word of mouth, and on the Saturday morning there were crowds of people outside taking pictures (and fortunately coming into the shop to spend too!) which lasted all day - and the same happened on Sunday.
We were overwhelmed by the response of the people of Rushden (and further afield) to the event. It seemed to strike a chord with people as a good news event in a dull January.
An event like this was a one-off and we'll never see the like again, but for those few days Osborne's and Rushden was national
news! All the comments we've had have been very positive. It's really put us all on the map!
Will Osborne - When Lego Came To Rushden - The Risdene Echo Vol 27 #2- March 2018
