It's quite easy, wandering round the small town of Billund, to start believing in the existence of a Lego god. You can't help but feel a master intelligence is at work here — the place is so manifestly wholesome, the street plan so well ordered, the pavements so tidy. Unostentatious automobiles proceed slowly along all-but-empty roads, stopping politely for pedestrians nowhere near a zebra crossing. A jovial red-and-yellow Lego giant points towards the town center; huge colored bricks lie scattered as if awaiting deployment in some exemplary new civic amenity (except that, being Denmark, it's not immediately apparent what else the town might need).
I half-expect to be plucked from the pavement, brushed up a bit and plumped down in front of the smart rectangular building labeled Head Office: Lego A/S. My goal here is to find out how, in the teeth of global recession and barely five years since it was being read the last rites, one of the world's best-loved brands has come back from the dead. For Lego, born of an earlier and tougher depression, is positively reveling in this one: the little studded, primary-colored bricks are selling like never before.
Its hometown, though, is a bit too much for some people. “I couldn't ever live here,” admits Mads Nipper, who looks and — when it comes to plastic bricks — acts about 12, but turns out to be one of the company's executive vice-presidents. “I’m nuts about Lego, believe me; I eat, sleep and breathe the stuff. But there’s a bit too much of it around here even for me.”
I got my first Lego set at the age of 5. Bits of it are still in a chest at my parents’ house: a gray plastic base board, an assortment of rectangular red-and-white bricks, a few square ones, roof tiles, beams, a little door that opens and shuts, a red-framed window with three transparent panes, red wheels with gray rubber tires. Exactly the same set is on display in the Lego Idea House in Billund, the front of the box adorned with a carefree 1960s kid in a home-knitted sweater who could almost, bar the unnaturally blond curls, have been me. Just along from that set, though, is a selection of Bionicles, fierce warrior-robots who live on the mythical-mystical isle of Mata Nui and fight each other with an array of unwholesome-looking weapons. My boy, now 8, liked those a lot a while ago. Now he is more into the Lego Star Wars Magnaguard Starfighter, whose 431-piece complexities he (and I) spent many hours wrestling with over Christmas. That is on display in Billund, too.
Charlotte Simonsen, the company’s spokeswoman, says more than 400 million people will play with Lego this year. After 50-odd years of production, there are apparently 62 Lego bricks for every man, woman and child on the planet. And most of us, I'd imagine, would say we felt pretty warmly towards these little chunks of injection-molded acrylonitrile butadiene styrene. Some would go considerably further. Lego reckons it has maybe 250,000 Afols, or Adult Fans of Lego, around the globe. They gather for mammoth week-long conventions with names such as BrickFest, and vie with each other to build the World’s Largest Lego Boat (4.4m long; 300,000 bricks), construct the Biggest Lego Train Layout Ever (1,019m) or beat the Fastest Time to Build the Lego Imperial Star Destroyer (3,104 pieces; five builders maximum and no pre-sorting allowed; record: 1 hour, 42 minutes, 43 seconds).
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