A Guinness World Record for the longest Lego bridge

Breaking a world record is surely in everyone’s bucket list. This September, I was one of seven lucky people from WSP Parsons Brinckerhoff, including five engineers, whom were challenged to break the Guinness World Record for the longest suspension bridge made out of Lego.

On the day we travelled to Weydon School, Surrey, where the event was held and made our way over to the school hall. On entering, we immediately caught sight of two large white pillars at either end of the room that would act as the bridge towers.

The two long and blue main cables snaked between the towers, while giant cardboard boxes filled with pre-fabricated pieces of deck were scattered around the hall.

As part of the design team, our role was to review the drawings to make sure that the bridge was well designed as well as oversee construction by professional Lego building company Bright Bricks.

Piecing together the parts certainly brought out our inner child, but equally we had to put on our very best thinking caps to get the design right

Turning these drawings into a reality was an imposing task. Certainly, the abundance of bricks on show here was on a different scale to anything we had seen before.

Piecing together the parts certainly brought out our inner child, but equally we had to put on our very best thinking caps to get the design right.

We had been told it would only take a couple of hours to assemble, and we’d be off by midday but setting a world record is no easy task. Bright Bricks found that due to the behaviour of the main cable, the deck cables were the wrong lengths and would need adjusting as the deck was built.

Before long we were invited to get stuck in and began fitting the deck pieces on one side of the bridge. It didn’t take us long to become well versed in the terminology, shouting across the room for ‘8 long stud plates’ to our colleagues building the other half of the bridge.

As the weight on the cables grew, Nick in our team spotted a tiny tilt on one of the gravity anchors that restrain the cables at either end of the bridge. Cue panic stations! Weights were drafted in from the school gym and put on the anchors to keep them stable and heavy blocks of Lego were sourced to avert the crisis.

We persevered with the assembly for several hours until finally a huge cheer went up. The bridge was complete; a new Guinness World Record with a 16.4m clear span!

Sadly it had to come straight down once completed; this was just a test run to get right the elements which had to be designed via trial and error. However, you’ll get a chance to see it as it has been re-assembled and is now on display at the new ICE Learning Infrastructure Hub in Westminster. Go and check it out.

In the meantime, I’d like to see if anyone else can break our world record!

Oliver Budd, engineer in the highways and bridges team at WSP Parsons Brinckeroff