I’m pleased to say that my Brickbuzz creative building workshops are finally back at Castelnau Community Centre in Barnes, West London. After the pandemic stopped them from happening for over a year, they are now running on Tuesday and Friday afternoons from 3:30pm to 5:00pm during the second half of the 2021 summer term.

When there’s not a pandemic on, there are quite a lot of Lego model shows in different venues around the UK throughout the year. These often feature model displays built by AFOLs (Adult Fans of Lego) which visitors both young and old can take inspiration from. When I’ve displayed models in these types of show over the years, parents have often asked me ‘Are there any local Lego clubs my children can join?’

When I was a kid, it annoyed me that there were lots of clubs around for things I wasn’t very interested in, like football, but nothing for Lego building. So I decided to set up an after-school club locally where children could come and build and play with Lego bricks together.

The sessions are freeform, with no fixed topic or structure– children can build whatever they want from the provided boxes of bricks. I help them with what they are trying to build if they need advice. There are also a range of inspirational models at each session to provide ideas, or just be played with.

For more information about coming to one of the creative building workshops, please visit Brickbuzz Ltd.

You can also see photos of some of the children’s builds on the Brickbuzz Instagram feed.

The LL-28 is a ship built in the studless Neo-Classic space style. There are lots of details on this one, especially the underside, as well as a few extra features.

Underneath there’s plenty of detailed greebling. There are four main engines, which can provide both forward and reverse thrust. The pipes which feed them could be some kind of futuristic fuel lines. Some of the pipes aren’t just decorative greebling, as they contain Technic axles that help reinforce the structure of the model. There are also several manoeuvring thrusters dotted around; see if you can spot them all.

Two thin pipes terminate roughly in the middle of the front wings. These also help support the edging along the wings, made from flexible hose parts, which tend to droop if they aren’t supported.

The side view shows off its sleek profile, as well as the two raised long-range scanning antennae on either side. The communication array is made up of three antennae on the nose and a radar dish at the back.

The rear module can detach from the spacecraft and slide out. There’s an opening ramp at the rear and the sides swing outwards to reveal an astronaut and control panel inside the module.

The images above show the underside with the front undercarriage raised and lowered.

The inspiration for this build is a spacecraft shown at the top of page 28 of the 200 Lego Ideas Book from 1985. There aren’t instructions for this ship in the book, but I always liked the shape of it, so I built as close a replica as I could based on its photograph. I also made a basic Photoshop mock-up of what it would look like in a blue and grey colour scheme rather than blue and white.

The replica model and the digital mock-up served as the starting point for the design of the much more complex and detailed ‘Neo’ version. This took several months to design, mainly through building and re-building different sections until it both looked good and was structurally sound.

The LL-228 designation is based on the number of the Ideas book and the page number the photo of the original ship appears on.

This large space base was built over five months by Jason Briscoe, Gary Davis, Tim Goddard, Andrew Hamilton, Rhys Knight, Peter Reid and me. Each side is over a metre long. The base was first displayed in July 2017 at Bricktastic in Manchester. It then travelled to Brick Live in London later in the summer and Jason drove it to the Skaerbaek fan weekend in September. It will be at the Great Western Brick Show in Swindon from 7-8th October.

There’s rocky terrain on the surface section, as well as Jason’s landing pad and imposing control tower. On the landing pad are Tim’s Inexorable and my Galaxy Explorer. On the left hand side you can see solar panels and storage tanks, with Jason’s white rover towards the front. On the right-hand side is my ore processing rover which is a mobile refinery plant.

Here’s a shot of the surface from a different angle:

I’ll update this post at some point with more information about the subterranean sections of the base. In the meantime you can see lots more photos of each section of the space base in this Flickr album.

On my return to building creations with Lego bricks, I focused on modern day scenes such as harbours with ships and container cranes. These were some of things I’d wanted to build when I was a kid but never got round to. However, my childhood passion was building spaceships and imaginary bases on distant planets. This is the story of my first proper foray back into outer space, completed just over a year ago in June 2015.

After a while I got to know a few AFOLs in the UK who built Space-themed designs– two of them had even written the definitive book on the subject! They encouraged me to get back into designing Space models again, and to try my hand at the ‘Neo-Classic Space’ (NCS) style. This style uses the same colour scheme as the original Lego Space range which appeared in the late 70s: grey, blue and translucent yellow for cockpits and windows. To bring things up to date it also makes use of the latest elements and employs building techniques to hide upward-facing studs for added realism.

After building a couple of rovers, it was time for me to try my first Neo-Classic spaceship. The initial plan was for a small three-pronged fighter, but after a few sketches and test builds it wasn’t going the way I wanted. I looked back at some old Lego catalogues for inspiration, and came across the 6931 FX Star Patroller from 1985. It was one of the last sets which used the original grey and blue colour scheme, although the designers gave it a dark blue canopy instead of a yellow one. The slanted rear wings and tall pillar reminded me of the three-pronged design in my sketches, so I decided to re-imagine the set at a larger scale using NCS techniques.

The final result turned out a bit larger than expected, and it took about six months’ work in my spare time to complete. My ship is 88cm long, 50cm wide and 31cm tall– the set that inspired it is about 30cm long. I’ve tried to reference many of the details in the original, such as the small exterior computers behind the cockpit area and the large engines on the middle wings. I’ve also made sure that the rear tower still has a gantry-like quality by using fence pieces mounted at angles. I’ve kept the flexible hoses feeding the rear engines, but beefed up the engine design here.

Despite being fairly large the ship is swooshable and has been designed to be carried by the central neck section. Most of the weight is at the back, so you can grasp the neck near where it meets the rear section and lift it. There are lots of overlapping plates in the neck to strengthen it, and even the pipes clipped along the sides help reinforce the structure. The rear wings are braced underneath so they don’t swing off when you swoosh her.

Other features include folding undercarriage and space for a small exploration rover in the rear cargo bay. The rear door swings down to become a ramp for it to drive out. When closed, the door can be locked in place so the rover doesn’t fall out the back. You can see more photos of the Star Patroller in this Flickr album.

Here is a typeface inspired by the Police logo found in the original 1989 LEGO Space Police sets. The theme featured spacecraft and rovers in a blue and black livery with translucent red glass. Its logo was the word ‘Police’ in a futuristic stencil typeface with dark red oblong shapes above and below it, inside a thin white border, re-created here in the top-left corner.

The distinctive logo was printed onto some bricks included with the sets, but apparently the typeface was not used anywhere else. In catalogues from the time there is a larger ‘Space Police’ logo using a more curved and three-dimensional typeface– but this is a less elegant design.

Based on the six letter designs in the original printed-element logo I created caps versions of all twenty-six in the alphabet. There is an alternate version which omits the thin cut-out line bisecting the lower half of the typeface. I may create numbers and punctuation symbols in due course. The letters currently exist as Illustrator artwork– they may be turned into a proper font file in the future when the numbers and punctuation are done.

So why make a Space Police alphabet? The original logo is a classic piece of 1980s science fiction styling– it fits the sleek and slightly menacing look of the sets perfectly. There’s also nostalgia for one of my favourite childhood LEGO themes. The internet wasn’t around yet, so the best way to find out what sets were coming in the new year was to go into a toyshop which gave out catalogues in January. Often the most exciting new sets in the catalogue were labelled with the dreaded footnote ‘Not available until September’, which meant an agonising wait– but also allowed time to save up pocket money.

On the first day of school in January 1989 a friend rushed to tell me about the new spaceships in the catalogue with red glass and flashing lights. Helpfully he’d neglected to bring the catalogue with him, but when I tracked one down the footnote for the Space Police read ‘available March’ –in time for my birthday! My main present that year was the 6781 Prisoner Transport (Known as the SP-Striker in the US).

The new alphabet will provide opportunities for custom stickers or brick printing for models inspired by the Space Police theme, such as this command rover: