Brick Wonders at Banbury Museum

Lego. Most of us are swimming in the stuff at home.  And there’s very few children who don’t like it.  For me, it’s part of childhood, remembering building with our parents and siblings, displaying out amazing wonky builds.  Our local museum had a Lego exhibition on recently and I finally managed to take N to see Brick Wonders.

Banbury museum isn’t somewhere we visit regularly. It’s small but does hold the occasional special exhibition, putting on children’s activities during the school holidays.  We went on an inset day though, so it was just the exhibition.  That didn’t matter because N was happy enough trying out all the canal based activities, testing his strength on the tug boat vs horse game. Then with his hands planted on the glass and face up close, watching the narrow boats moving along the canal and guessing whether they would fit under the raised bridge.

What we love about Banbury Museum:

• It’s free (apart from the special exhibitions
• It has a nice café
• You can watch the canal while in the shelter
• It’s in the shopping centre so you can offer your children a museum visit if you need to shop
• They have a children’s corner for younger kids for exploring and looking at books
• They see quirky gifts in the shop
• It’s pretty much always quiet if you get there early on, even in school holidays.
• It’s not big so you can just pop in for an hour if you’re hanging around town waiting for any reason

The Brick Wonders exhibition is being held there for a few months, until 18th November 2017.  It’s part of a touring exhibition, and brings together over half a million Lego bricks to let you discover the wonders of the world.  These include the Great Wall of China, the Pyramids of Giza and Niagara Falls.  There’s also displays through different technological ages, including an operating theatre, an airport and the twitter icon.

We liked the big airport display the best along with the international space station, although there was so much to look at, in fact around 60 items including huge wall hangings of the earth and Australis Borealis.

We hadn’t been told on arrival that there were some little people doing unusual things to look out for, so we did stop before leaving to try and find the man dress as a white rabbit.

Of course you can’t go to an exhibition of Lego bricks without doing some building. There’s a wall space but when we went it was pretty full and N didn’t want to break what was there.  And another area where you could create something then set it up on the display.  So we spent a bit of time building – mine was a little abstract (I can never think what to build) while N made an interesting vehicle that I had to photograph from all angles. I’m not sure he wanted to leave it there.

The exhibition isn’t expensive at £4 for adults and £2 for children.  It was interesting to see, but given we probably didn’t spend more than 40 minutes there I think I’d have expected more from it.  A little trail for kids to tick off would have been nice. Rather than just the man at the door asking whether we’d found the white rabbit man as we left…bit late given we weren’t told about it on arrival!

But I’ve seen a friend take her children during half term and it looked like there were other activities to do as well as just looking round, so maybe we just missed out because it wasn’t a weekend or holiday.

Seeing the brick builds does make you think about how basic our own Lego builds are. There’s some way to go before we get anywhere near these.

Have you ever seen a similar exhibition?

Check out the 90s exhibition at Banbury Museum, being held in 2024.