LEGO builder Simon Pickard profiled ahead of BRICKLIVE

Prominent AFOL Simon Pickard has been featured on a national website, giving a spotlight to the LEGO hobby.

Simon Pickard, known for his collaborative Brick to the Past builds and work as Blocks magazine’s Build Specialist, has been profiled by the Daily Mirror website.

As if to make fellow fans envious, the article highlights Simon’s solution to not having space for LEGO bricks:

He has FIVE purpose-built sheds in his garden that hold an estimated one million Lego bricks in plastic boxes for his ­ambitious and wide-ranging designs.

Master builder Simon, 38, has created 50,000-piece models that can be up to 25sq ft and stand 3.5ft tall.

Fans will identify with Simon’s shopping sprees:

Simon is vague about how much cash he splashes out on his hobby. But he admitted: “It is ­incredible how much it can cost. I go to the Cardiff Lego store once a month and I don’t come away without ­purchases of up to three figures.”

Simon said people do rent his models, which helps pay the bills.

Simon will be at BRICKLIVE Birmingham this week, which runs from Thursday to Sunday, displaying his Monaco Hairpin build that was features on the cover of Blocks Issue 33.

Simon said: “It’s well known among the fan-build community that you can build roads ­using bricks on their sides but obviously that’s all very rigid because Lego is rectangular. I managed to develop a way of creating the same ­effect but going in a curve. With my latest model, the curve goes uphill. It’s taken a long time to devise.”