MOC: London in Microscale

[LeeMcG]

Hi Everyone

I haven't had a lot of time for building recently so I decided to try my hand at some microscale building - I thought it would be quicker, or at least allow me to finish individual models.

I wanted to do real small microscale, fitting real landmarks on to 4x6 (ish) plates and seeing if I could still make them recognisable.

I live in London, and there are some world-recognised buildings here, so it seemed the obvious place to start.

Here is The London Eye:

Nelson's column:

the White Tower at the Tower of London:

and Tower Bridge:

There are more landmarks on my flickr set including Big Ben, Tower 42, the Imperial War Museum and City Hall.

Despite just doing this so that I could have small models that I could complete, I was convinced that I should put them on display in my local LEGO store. This meant building a setting for them, as well as some typically London decorations (taxis, buses, phone and post boxes), so I ended up spending a lot of time anyway:

Thanks for taking a look and, fingers crossed, I'll have some more time to build and post soon.

[Kristel]

This is great! The buildings look great, but the highlight for me is actually the base. I love the use of the orange for the streets! It reminds me of a stylised map you might find in a tourist brochure.

[Redhead1982]

You did a great job! It looks like a lovely pop-out map of London's attractions. It's not easy building in microscale, but you did extremely well. My favourite is the London Eye. It's a simple design, yet so recognizable. I like the trans-clear heads for the cabins.

[Kivi]

Myself being quite a regular visitor to and a huuuuge admirer of London, this is amazing! All the buildings are instantly recognisable but the best thing is that you put them all in a neatly arranged layout, complete with river and roads. What about adding some 1x1 bricks with headlight to the side of the display to represent the tube tunnels?

Good luck if you build more.

[rriggs]

Nicely done and everything is instantly recognisable.

Only other observations I would have is that the White Tower looks a bit squat for it's footprint. Maybe needs to be another floor higher. From outside the Tower grounds it looks squat but it's actually quite a tall structure.

Also, Tower Bridge looks a bit skinny. I think that it needs to two studs wide all the way across to better suit the proportions.

Did you deliberately put the Mayor's office the wrong way round for the purposes of taking the photo or is that a minor booboo? The slope of the building should be away from the river...

Love the use of the grey frogs ilo lions on Nelson's Column! St Paul's and the BT Tower are particularly brilliant but most of all I love the tiny guns outside the Imperial War Museum.

Great job!

Cheers

Rog

Edited June 14, 2013 by rriggs

[lightningtiger]

The BT tower is the best of the whole MOC 'LeeMcG', wonderful work......Brick on !

[Maxim I]

this is really epic!!!!

Awesome job!!!

[timmyc1983]

Amazing microscale build. Having been to London several times, i love the place and I love your model just as much!! Makes me want to jump on a plane and head over right now!! (I wish!!)

I particularly like the little buses, taxis etc, they top off the whole model really well. It looks like it could be a London based board game!

Happy building

Edited June 14, 2013 by timmyc1983

[Chilis]

Great! I love the base, funny detail with the bones. As others have mention, the buildings are instantly recognisable and they are very detailed, even in microscale. Well done LeeMcG

[Peppermint_M]

You know, one thing the base could have had is a tiny Underground station and train!

It is an excellent build.

[Wedge09]

Great work in a such small scale :thumbup:

[LeeMcG]

Thanks very much everyone for all the comments... I think I'll answer some directly.

@rriggs. Indeed I have turned CIty Hall round - good spot. This was because I wanted people to be able to see the slope from the side. There are a few other things changed for artistic licence - the Tate Modern is also rotated because the familiar view is from St. Paul's, and the location of the Imperial War Museum and BT tower have been adjusted somewhat to allow them to even be on this map.

I will look again at the height of the White Tower. It may have creeped wider, without gaining the respective height. However I am pretty sure Tower Bridge is right (or as right as it can be), as I've done a super-imposed picture. Moreover, these are all odd scales, and I decided the scale by choosing one element - usually the size of a pillar, etc. (which has really got to be one brick wide or two). In the case of Tower Bridge, I scaled everything else from the towers being 1 stud wide - so you might argue that all other parts are too big but the tower width is correct by definition :-)

A few requests for a tube. Believe me, it was considered. In the end though I left it out because I ran out of time and justified it as I thought it would be either a step too far in scale inconsistency, or too small to get any kind of detail. Given the vast difference in scale between CIty Hall, Imperial War Museum, a postbox and a bone maybe I'm just kidding myself. I left out the Cenotaph for scale reasons too, and Elephant and Castle because none of the bricks for my brick-built elephant seemed to be available in pink :-)

Thanks again for the comments. If anyone is local and wants to see it, it'll be in the Stratford Lego store for the next 6 weeks or so.

Lee

Edited June 14, 2013 by LeeMcG

[Xcod119]

T.hat is just incredible, brilliant job on the eye and Big Ben, st Paul's is good

[TheLegoDr]

That is a really neat build. I love seeing large scale layouts in microscale form. I know very little about London, but the buildings I do recognize are easily enough to figure out. I think the downside is scale amongst one another. The double deckers look great, but clearly too large compared to the buildings. But with that said, I actually like the different scaled buildings, making them small enough to see the detail to know what they are. It definitely does look like a pop-up map for tourists. Maybe you could market it as such...hard to carry around the city with you, but it'd be fun.

Keep up the great work!