Most of my life was spent building LEGO sets. The first set I ever got was the Exploriens Hovertron, set number 6815. I got it for Christmas when I was 6.
Recently I’ve gotten away from it because I don’t have much extra money to buy sets. I also don’t have much extra time to build them if I had them. Something I’ve always wanted to do is build a big LEGO city.
I don’t remember where I first got the idea. I know when I was in elementary school, one of my neighbors has a shelf of sets he had built and I thought it was cool that he built them and put them on display. That might have been what led to me wanting my own display.
When I was even younger we would always have a ceramic Christmas village set up somewhere in the house during December. It had houses and trees and fences and people doing things. I think that may be what made me decide my LEGO display would be a city.
Now that I’m stuck inside for the winter, I’ve been thinking about this again. I’ve got a couple different approaches I could take, in terms of how things would be set up, if I decided to go through with it.
My first thought, and possibly the easiest way would be to have multiple free standing buildings that are not connected to each other. This would make it easy to move things around if I feel I don’t like something where it is. I could also use this strategy to make my own Christmas village to put in the bay window in my living room.
Another idea is to get some base plates and just build everything on them. This would make it easier to put things close together if I made a big city instead of a smaller village. One thing I’d like to do is make a big layout similar to a model train layout. If I were to make something like that, I’d use this method.
The third method I found would be almost a mix of the two. While looking at MOCs (My Own Creations) on https://rebrickable.com/mocs/ I found a large collection by user gabizon that seemed really cool. They made their own modular bases to build on and the bases click together side by side to make the layouts. This would be a cool way to make a shelf display or something similar. Or a little Christmas village that could be easily taken apart and snapped back together each year.
I’m not sure which of these three I would end up doing if I did make my own city. I suppose it would depend on what my end goal would be since they each have different uses.
I do know I would not want many pre-built sets. There’s not really anything wrong with using them, but I’d like my city to have a more organic look to it. I’d like to be able to show it off and not have it be something everyone has seen already.
A shelf display seems like the most plausible for me to build. Then it wouldn’t take up too much space but still be enough to be fun. It would probably have a big city theme to it so I could fit as much into a small place as possible.
Some things I’d want to put on it would be a library, fire station, police station, and a bank. I would also want some run down, possibly abandoned buildings, such as apartments. To give it a New York City feel I could even have some buildings with permanently temporary scaffolding.
Luckily I won’t be limited to only buying sets to get the parts I need. LEGO has a section on their website to order individual bricks. There are also some other sites that sell bricks.
A Life, Ensnared 