From Brickingham Palace to block-built Black Pearls: The Best of LEGO Brick Festival London

You’ve exhausted the shelves of the LEGO shop, you’ve marvelled at the miniature village at LEGOLAND, and you’ve rebuilt your existing sets in every combination you can think of. What next for the avid LEGO fan?

• The 20 best LEGO sets of all time, ever!

The Brick Festival, that’s what. A travelling series of enthusiast events with building stations, traders and more rare LEGO sets than your bank account can bear to see, it’s a must-visit calendar event. Last weekend, we headed down to the London stop on its nationwide tour at The Royal National Hotel — here’s 5 reasons you need to block out its next date on your calendar.

1. Rare sets

The meat of the Brick Festival is in its army of traders. Dozens of sellers take to the show floor, each with stalls filled to bursting with rare sets. For the uninitiated, LEGO puts a shelf life on its creations, usually only of a couple of years — and once they’re marked as ‘retired’, you won’t find them at a LEGO store again. You’re then left to hunt second hand sellers and resellers for these sought after builds. But the Brick Festival puts many of these sellers under one roof, letting you browse sets that in some cases can be decades old. Prices are fair too, with most sellers looking to compete against the cheapest prices they’ve seen on platforms like eBay, according to those we spoke with.

And there were some incredibly rare sets on offer, including the hugely-sought-after original Pirates of the Caribbean Black Pearl ship set, and the LEGO Creator Set Grand Carousel. The carousel set was only ever made in limited quantities, and comes with a rare sound-producing block that pre-dates the current Smart Play wave of interactive builds, and commands prices upwards of £1,500!

Image 1 of 6

2. Incredible MOC builds

If you’re looking for inspiration outside of the guided boxes of brick ideas, the LEGO die-hards use the Brick Festival as a great showcase for their own unique creations, known as MOCs — “My Own Creations”.

There were some really inventive builds on show, from mini Star Wars dioramas to full-scale LEGO cities and even some abstract 3D portraits of football heroes Lionel Messi and Diego Maradona (nicely timed, given LEGO’s own recent World Cup trophy set release). But the star of the show was a humungous brick-built Buckingham Palace — Brickingham Palace, if you will — complete with a Queen’s (or should that be King’s, these days?) Guard army. All that was missing was a mini Andrew figure, presumably, ahem, bricking it.

3. Kids play zones

If you needed to distract the kids from your wallet for five minutes, there were plenty of stop-off points to sit them down and stretch their imaginations for a bit. There were several stations around the Brick Festival dedicated to free-form brick building, with large tubs of LEGO to dive into, as well as colouring stations, video game consoles with LEGO titles running on them, and a very cool LEGO robot pen, complete with remote-controlled LEGO creations.

4. Unique pick-a-brick buys

Plenty of LEGO stores have a ‘Pick-a-brick’ wall, letting you fill up a container pick-n-mix style with the pieces missing from your collection. However, they tend to be quite limited, focussing on common, widely-available pieces, lacking the more unusual blocks that can be found exclusive to some sets.

The Brick Festival’s pick-a-brick seemed to take a different approach — a smorgasbord mix of whatever loose bricks can be found, ready to fill a plastic pint glass at £8 a pop. It’s essentially a tonne of broken down sets thrown together, meaning if you know exactly what you’re looking for, and have the patience to dig in, you could find some really unusual bricks to add to your collection.

5. Thousands of minifigs

What LEGO convention would be complete without a mountain of minifigures? Brick Festival really didn’t disappoint in this regard — there were literally thousands of unique minifigs to purchase from the many sellers at the show, including rare and discontinued figures priced in the low hundreds of pounds. With LEGO now selling some of its most coveted figures in ‘blind bag’ lucky dip formats, and in limited seasonal runs, Brick Festival offered a great chance to pick up sought after characters no longer available, at reasonable prices and often with bundle deals, too.

Missed this weekend’s event? Don’t stress! Brick Festival events happen multiple times a month up and down the country — view the calendar here, with upcoming nearby events in Milton Keynes in May and Brigthon in June. Ticket prices vary depending on the session you book in for — early slots being pricier to attract hunters of the rarer sets — but start at £8 for adults and £6 for kids, with under 5s going free. Keep an eye out for the next London date announcement, and just make sure you bring a full wallet with you…

• Looking to buy some LEGO? Here's some more of our favourites on store shelves today

Skip the search — follow Shortlist on Google News to get our best lists, news, features and reviews at the top of your feeds!