When I walked into COSTCO the other day I wasn’t expecting an epiphany. But then the LEGO World Cup edition tipped me over the edge. Firstly, it looked pretty ghastly – square bricks being used to create a rounded object is problematic from the get‑go – and secondly it spoke of an abandonment of what I thought LEGO was all about: imagination.
I’ve noticed with my own grandkids that they have taken every available shelf space in their rooms hostage to the placement of completed LEGO sets from Star Wars to Harry Potter. Don’t misunderstand me, the construction of these little wonders is something to behold in the hands of a 7‑year‑old, but then they simply sit there gathering dust. Never to be smashed up to create something new, something phoenix‑like from the ashes.
I vividly remember as a kid having a huge cardboard box of standard LEGO that allowed me to create, without boundaries, my own spaceships, racing cars, houses and anything else my wonderful imagination could conceive. Then when it was time my inventions were dismantled only to be reincarnated as another wonder of the mind.
The apparent stampede by the LEGO gods to create these specialised kits reduces imagination and that’s worrying. I can’t envisage using Hagrid’s head or Yoda’s body within the construct of anything else other than the prescribed edition.
What troubles me most is that imagination — real imagination — only flourishes when there is space for uncertainty, for the half‑formed idea, for the glorious mess of trial and error. Give a child a box of unlabelled bricks and you hand them the raw material of possibility; give them a pre‑ordained kit and you hand them instructions. One teaches them to follow, the other teaches them to invent. And invention is the quiet engine of human progress. It’s how we learn to see beyond what is, toward what might be. When we narrow the creative aperture, even with the best intentions, we risk raising a generation brilliant at assembling someone else’s vision but hesitant to trust their own.
Surely the makers of LEGO aren’t just concentrating on the commercial uplift of these expensive and narrow sets but if they are then shame on them for killing the dreams that imagination spawns.
“Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited, whereas imagination embraces the entire world.” — Albert Einstein.
© Ian Kirke 2026 & title photograph.
@ iankirke.bsky.social