Preston’s under-threat bus station has been given a new lease of life...in Lego.
Rob Hasker, a 29-year-old NHS worker, has spent six weeks completing a metre-wide model of the Brutalist building, which is earmarked for demolition, using 3,000 bricks.
After previously building Lego replicas of the Twin Towers and the Queen Vic pub from Eastenders, Mr Hasker was looking for an iconic functional building to copy.
Mr Hasker, from Northampton. said: “I like the Brutalist style because it is what it is - there’s no fancy bits that don’t do anything, it’s completely functional.
“I also like the social side of it, that after World War Two, there was a lot of rebuilding going on.
“I put the term into Google and the top results were all about Preston Bus Station, because of the recent speculation about it’s future.
“I ended up reading about the history of the building and it snowballed from there. Although I haven’t been to visit the building, I looked at a lot of the images available on the Internet and used those to inspire me.”
Mr Hasker said the building’s iconic curves were the most difficult parts to replicate, and he had six or seven attempts at getting them right using reclaimed pieces from a previous model of the Titanic.
He sources reclaimed Lego online, and said he used “artistic licence” to transform parts of the bus station into a railway station, so that internal pieces such as the waiting room and ticket machine would work.
Since uploading a series of images onto photo sharing website Flickr, Mr Hasker has been inundated by nationwide attention.
He said: “It’s been quite a surprise to me, but I know there is a lot of debate about the future of the building and it’s architectural value.
“Although I’m aware of the economic constraints the council have, I think bulldozing the station would be a decision they came to regret.”
Because of the interest in his work, he has decided that he won’t break the structure apart, and instead hopes to add more levels to it in coming months.
Mr Hasker has been building with Lego since he was a child and said he finds it therapeutic after a hard day at work dealing with medical records. He is looking into visiting the real building in the near future.
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