Well, we had hoped to be blown away by the Art of the Brick after seeing their ads and the website, unfortunately it was more of a slight breeze than a storm Dennis experience.
Thankfully I bought the tickets when they had a half price offer, which I believe is still available. However, be warned, you do need to buy a ticket for each adult and each child even though it states that a child goes free with each adult, that is not how they have priced the tickets on ticket master. This definitely caught out a few families in the queue in front of us with one family having to loose two members of their party and still pay a bit more for 2 adults and three children. We joined the rear of the, quite long, queue around 15 minutes before our booked time and eventually came to the front whilst, the quite harrased, staff were trying to sort out the issues with the tickets for the other families. We entered exactly on time for out slot and were asked to sit in a small room for a short film. We were on the front bench which was a bit too close to the screen for comfortable viewing. The film, around five minutes long, was solely Nathan Sawaya (the artist for all the models) telling us how brilliant he was, it was quite a cringey film and didn't really add anything to the experience apart from the feeling that the creator of the exhibition really liked to talk about himself. (See the self portrait of the artist below)
We were then ushered into the rest of the tour. Thankfully, it's a self guided tour and you can make your way around quite impeded due to the timed tickets.
On to the builds. Or sculptures as the artist calls them. They are very good and obviously take a lot of skill but, it's all very much of a muchness. The builds are very similar, a lot of large figures of people in weird poses or with things coming out of their heads etc. with a plaque to explain the concept, much of which seemed like inspirational messages, the type your mum might post on Facebook. There were themed rooms around 4-5 in total, the one that was slightly different had some copies of famous works of art then made into a 3d version which were good but again not mind blowing.
We then made our way through to the final area where there was a large dinosaur, again it was good but not amazing and suddenly we were at the exit. This contained the most cramped play area ever, it was very busy and we didn't stop as it seemed like it was just for little ones, then into a small shop with the usual overpriced tat. And that was it. 20 minutes and that included the film at the start and a trip to the toilet!
If I was to try and put my finger on what it was that made the exhibit disappointing I'd say it seemed to lack any heart. It was all a bit samey and would probably would have benefited from being a collaborative show with lots of different types of builds and some interactivity.
For us it was not worth the almost £15 we paid for the two of us and I was glad that at least we got the childs cost free.
To be fair there were lots of people who were walking around saying what they liked and oooing at some of the builds,
perhaps they hadn't been to other more diverse Lego shows or maybe we are being too critical.
Conclusion
Decide for yourself, but don't expect it to fill a full afternoon, perhaps 40 minutes at best and make sure the weird ticketing system doesn't catch you out.
