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Meet ‘Brickstand’, The Man Making All Your Favourite Football Grounds Out Of Lego

As niche creative projects go, it doesn't get much more ambitious than trying to make every Football League ground out of toy bricks. We spoke to Chris Smith, aka ‘Brickstand’, about his work.

There are many ways for someone to demonstrate a compulsive infatuation with football. Collecting replica kits; buying all the assorted paraphernalia; hunting autographs from the world's greatest players, or Gillingham players for that matter; forking out inordinate amounts of money to travel all over the country watching a team, home and away. There is no activity which it is more socially acceptable to become hopelessly obsessed with than the beautiful game, with the friends and families of hardcore supporters generally unmoved by watching them spend time, effort and thousands of pounds for the pleasure of immersing themselves in the culture of fandom. Obsessing over tactical minutiae; planning major life events around the fixture list; refusing to speak to their nearest and dearest for much of the weekend when their side loses; these things are par for the course for dedicated football fans, and mundane facts of life for everyone else.

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Still, if there is one fan who is anything but mundane in expressing his love for the sport, it is Chris Smith, aka ' Brickstand'. Starting a few years ago, Chris made it his mission to make every Football League stadium out of Lego, taking requests and commissions as he went along and branching out to Scottish and non-league grounds here and there. As niche creative projects go, it doesn't get much more ambitious than trying to construct this many detailed models out of nothing more than toy bricks, a painstaking task which takes incredible attention to detail and dozens of accumulative hours of endeavour. Indeed, when it comes to investing time and money in the pursuit of football fandom, Chris puts even the most dedicated of supporters to shame.

Celtic Park

While there are few who would deny that Brickstand's output up until now represents quite some achievement as a body of work, especially not after having seen the meticulous, uncannily accurate and aesthetically satisfying stadium models that Chris makes, it would be reasonable to wonder aloud why exactly someone would embark upon such a demanding enterprise. Speaking to VICE Sports over the phone, Chris tries to give some insight into how he got into the project, and why he decided to mix football and Lego to make what is essentially an unconventional form of art. "It started when I was on the internet one day and saw a load of American football and baseball stadiums made out of Lego," Chris says. "I thought that I'd go and look for all the English football grounds as well, because somebody was bound to have done it. When I tried to find them, I realised that nobody had, so I thought I'd give it a try myself.

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"I support Crystal Palace, so I did Selhurst Park first," Chris goes on. "The whole thing basically went from there. I thought that I may as well try to do all of the grounds really, rather than just one or two, because that seemed a bit pointless." Working from his base in Altrincham, he was soon getting enthusiastic responses from fans on social media. "Next, I went to the local start-up loans office, and had to do a little pitch to try to get some funding to get me started with enough bricks. I ended up with a small business loan of £5,000 to spend on Lego, and things kind of snowballed from that point on."

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