It's just lumps of snap-together plastic, yet in a virtual age, children are still clamouring for Lego. And it's a favourite that we don't outgrow, says Nick Duerden
Monday, 6 December 2010
It is a Saturday afternoon, as we stand on the brink of pre-Christmas panic, and London's tireless shopping mecca, the West End, is chokka with small people dragging larger ones in and out of toy emporia, driven on by a heady mixture of hunger, lust and greed.
The toy market always was a cut-throat one, manufacturers managing to target their audience with dastardly élan, and each year the emphasis appears to strive towards bigger, better, faster, more. But in one corner of the biggest toy emporium of them all, Hamleys, tradition is still rather quaintly observed.
The basement here is where Lego lives, has done for years now, and the little building blocks occupy an awful lot of floor space. The displays are lavish, the complicated train stations and cityscapes and traffic junctions all cluttered with those miniature versions of what always did appear to be Village People – pirates, cowboys, firemen ... and is that a miner? Gathered around each display are families straining for a better view. The vast majority are boys and men, Lego is ostensibly a construction toy, and construction ostensibly, though not exclusively, a male pursuit. But the brand that has tried to engage girls before is in the process of doing so again. Marko Ilincic, its managing director for Britain and Ireland, promises that it will target girls successfully this time.
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