On Lego, love and friendship

THERE is a locked room in Lego’s corporate museum, in Billund in Denmark, which is called the Vault. It is a large space, filled with shelves that are arranged in chronological order, starting in 1958 and stretching away towards the present day. Between them, the shelves contain around 10,000 sets of Lego.

The Vault is used by the toymaker’s designers as a source of inspiration, but its effect on first-time visitors is what makes the room remarkable.

It’s impossible not to seek out sets from your own childhood, not to be drawn back to an earlier version of yourself and, for lots of people, not to well up. We thought about having Kleenex as a sponsor, says Signe Wiese, an in-house historian.