THE lyrics to Ed Sheeran’s classic hit Lego House begin with “I'm gonna pick up the pieces and build a Lego house”.
Well, Llandrindod Wells resident Jenni Moorhouse picked up around 7,500 pieces and built a Lego hotel – the spa town’s Metropole Hotel to be precise.
The masterpiece took Jenni, 61, around 18 months to complete, with her towering feat topped off by being put on display in the famous 150-year-old hotel this week.
International Lego Day was celebrated on January 28 – it is held on the same day that Danish carpenter, Godtfred Kirk Christiansen, first submitted his patent for the original Lego brick in 1958 – and we asked our readers to post images of their greatest Lego achievements.
There were some brilliant submissions, but nothing encapsulated Powys quite so perfectly as Jenni’s magnificent Metropole.
“The Metropole took about 18 months, getting the towers looking right took ages,” admits Jenni, who has also created another iconic Powys building, the Wyeside Arts Centre in Builth Wells, from plastic bricks, and is also planning to take on a Lego build of another famous spa town structure, the Automobile Palace during its heyday, in the future.
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“I’ve added the bits which are memorable for me. It would have been huge if I’d done the whole thing. The bedrooms are from total imagination as I’ve never stayed there.”
It’s certainly been a labour of love for Jenni, a locum eye care liaison officer with the RNIB, who provides information as well as practical and emotional support to people losing their sight.
“It’s built from approximately 7,500 bricks,” she said. “That’s an estimate as there are so many bricks not visible.
“Why the Met? Well, Lego released a hotel model which I didn’t like so I thought why not try to replicate the hotel I see most often.
“I took loads of photos of the front and back to try to get that accurate. Inside, the rooms are from pure imagination, though the ground floor is based on what’s there.”
READ MORE: After five generations and 125 years, family sells iconic Powys hotel
Lego celebrated its 90th anniversary last year and Jenni has been a fan for half a century. “I’ve loved Lego since I was 11-years-old, in the 1970s, but there was a large gap until my children left home around 5 years ago,” she added.
“It enables me to switch off and build what I like. I take down and rebuild as many times as I like until I get what I imagined.”
Lego has come a long way over the past 90 years – from a small carpenter’s workshop in Denmark to a modern, global enterprise that is now one of the world’s largest manufacturers of toys; not to mention the expansion to 10 Legoland theme parks around the world, including a water park in Italy.
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