Bricktastic 2025 – a round up of our club at the UK’s largest LEGO fan event

Around 30 Brick Alley members crossed the Pennines to attend Bricktastic in February, the UK’s largest Lego fan event and the only one in the UK formally recognised by LEGO themselves. The event was in aid of Fairy Bricks, a charity that provides LEGO sets to children in hospital.

Some of our members attended the event to volunteer and support the running of the event and activities, and others took their LEGO models to display to the public.

Bricktastic ran for three days from Friday to Sunday. The Friday was set up day along with Bricktastic Lite, which saw the teams from Pick a Brick at Lego and the Engagement Team from Bricklink, amongst other Lego professionals come along and deliver presentations and question and answer sessions. Saturday and Sunday was open to the public, where nearly 10,000 people attended. Saturday evening was a formal dinner for those displaying and volunteering. This was a great opportunity to network with other Lego User Groups but also for Brick Alley members to spend some time together.

Brick Alley members had everything from planes, trains to space ships on display at Bricktastic. The great thing about Brick Alley is everyone loves Lego but you can build and do the things that interest you. One thing we do as a group is collaboration builds, with this year’s Famous Brits Habitats and North East landmark mosaics being on display at Bricktastic.

Bricktastic did their own collaboration build this year and the challenge was to repurpose set 10318 Concorde into something else. This resulted in some weird and wonderful builds, with our very own Jack (often seen at Lego shows sporting Mr T jewelry made out of LEGO!) turning his Concorde into a two headed dragon with one head representing the UK and the other the French. After all, Concorde was a collaboration between the two nations.

Many of Brick Alley members are also members of LNUR (LEGO Northern UK Railway) and the team were at Bricktastic with one of the largest Lego train layouts I’ve seen. This year was the debut of the Forth Rail Bridge which consists of over 100,000 LEGO parts of which around 5,000 of them were black Technic pins and 2,000 were 1×16 Red Technic bricks.

The detail was fantastic and they even had minifigures hanging over the bridge in gantries painting the bridge red. It was a truly spectacular build and the bridge spanned some 8 meters.

Other builds on display by Brick Alley members included, Maxine’s Zoo, Cameron’s Classic Space layout including spaceships and a spacetrain, Matt’s space station hanger build, John’s train and high street layout, Adam’s gym equipment with working mechanisms and the ability to change the weight and Steve’s Disneyland Paris Castle, with a working parade.

Bricktastic is an international event with attendees coming from around the globe. Youtube’s Beyond the Brick made the trip especially for Bricktastic and featured many of Brickalley’s member’s builds in their videos.

One of the models Beyond the Brick featured was Andy’s medieval layout to name but a few. Jule’s another Brick Alley member, took part in a collaboration build of the New Hashima Cyberpunk City.

He contributed the fire station module to the build and the towering 2 meter high build, with its neon lights and monorail was also featured by Beyond the Brick.

There were so many amazing and wonderful builds on display at Bricktastic to cover them all here. A couple of mentions of some great builds by members of other LUGs include a fully functioning funfair, a Great Ball Contraption (GBC) with around 100 modules and a large scale football stadium.

Some Brick Alley members are already on with planning and building for Bricktastic 2026! We hope to see you there or at one of our own shows across the North East in the coming months.