Findings & Results – Big Brick City Survey 2022

Most popular names for LEGO cities and towns in 2022

The most popular LEGO city name in our survey was no name at all – over 14% – 26 out of 375 entries – specified no name at all! The most popular actual name for cities was “LEGO City”.

Here is a breakdown of the languages LEGO cities were named in:

Further data to be added soon.

Landmarks in LEGO cities

We asked two questions about the builders’ cities to ascertain what was the tallest building in their city, and to see if there was some

• Do you have a landmark in your city? If so, what is it?
• How tall is the tallest building in your city?

What’s the most notable landmark in your town?

20% of cities had a park, public square or other open space as the largest landmark in the city; a transport hub or skyscraper were the next most popular landmarks in LEGO cities at 17%. 10% of cities didn’t have a major landmark at all!

We would love to see these landmarks you’ve built – we hope to add an ability for you to upload a photo for future surveys.

Height of the tallest building in LEGO cities

As you can see from the data below, over 75% of LEGO cities had a tallest structure which was under 100cm tall. Given many people build in their bedrooms or studies on a table (see “location” information), this certainly limits the height of potential structures in their LEGO cities.

Only three respondents claimed to have a structure taller than 250cm (100 inches) in their city – impressive!

Populations of LEGO cities

• The largest single population of a LEGO city was a whopping 10,000 minifigures (we suspect some exaggeration there but it may be possible!)
• The average population of a LEGO city from the survey was between 100 – 200 minifigures accounting for 24% of all LEGO cities
• Three quarters of LEGO cities had a population of 360 or fewer. One quarter of cities had a population  of 50 or fewer
• Half of the LEGO cities in the survey had a population under 180

Most LEGO cities would be considered hamlets or very small villages by human standards; this seems sensible when the data on sizes of LEGO cities is taken in to account too, as the average (mode) size of metropolis entered had a size of around 2 x 2 metres – about 90 metres squared in human terms!

Does your city have a railway, railroad or tram?

As were we putting together the questions for the survey kept expanding, and this one was no exception as a late addition to the roster of questions we were asking LEGO city builders. Trains are quite an addition to any city (as well as being a lot of fun!), and new passenger and freight trains are released in LEGO’s City theme every few years.

We were pleased to see that around two-thirds of respondents had some from of rail-related transport in their cities!

Size of LEGO cities

Another of the questions respondents were asked was about the rough area their city occupied, when built.

As you can see from the data below, around 50% of all cities were under 2 metres squared (or 64 32-stud baseplates) in area. We suspect the responses here are fairly unreliable as people guessing sizes are liable to get them wrong, and there is a tendency to exaggerate the size of things when asked – particularly if the respondent wasn’t near their city at the time of completing the questionnaire.

Where do people store their LEGO towns?

Another aspect of the LEGO town building fandom we wanted to explore in this survey was where people display – or store – their LEGO displays. We had an early hunch that most people would be building in their bedrooms or studies within their own homes, which turned out to be correct – around 78% of respondents answered to that effect.

How is your LEGO city governed?

40% of LEGO cities had an elected official such as a mayor or president as the government method of their city, followed by 32% who hadn’t considered how their city is governed.

12% were under an empire, monarchy or dictatorship with most of these being either the city builder or their sigfig!

This question garnered some particularly weird answers we loved! Here are a few of our favourites:

• “Fictitious British Dictatorship”
• “I rule as the omnipotent overlord”
• “Batman”
• “Elected mayor is a front for unelected Darth Vader dictatorship”
• “A Patrician, ‘one man, one vote; I’m the man, I have the vote'” (this builder is presumably a Terry Pratchett fan too!)
• “Ralph Whiggum (sic)” – a Simpsons fan, presumably!

So…that’s it!

The Big Brick City Survey achieved our original goal, which was to determine the most popular LEGO city name. It also allowed us to do something a little different from our day to day tasks,

Thank yous

Thank you to everyone who took part in the survey – we wish we could come and play with your cities! A big thank you to Henry who did the bulk of analysis, and to Lewis for his help with the pretty side of things.

Another big thank you to all the LEGO media fan sites who shared the questionnaire with their audiences, which definitely helped to boost our numbers and make the survey a more valuable process.

Ideas for improvement

We plan to run the Big Brick City Survey again in late 2023.  Some initial thoughts on changes to the survey and how we display the responses:

• It would be great to allow builders to upload an image or two of their LEGO cities so we can see what they all look like!
• The survey is only available in English, which rules out a large portion of the LEGO city building population worldwide. We’ll look at options for this but suspect we’ll be remaining English only for the time-being.
• A better system for identifying the size of cities may be worth investigating. We’ll have a think on that!
• Some questions would be nice to allow respondents to add extra information – we were really intrigued by the 15 respondents who didn’t have their LEGO city in a bedroom, study, garage, shed or in storage, for example

If you have a question you would like us to add to the 2023 survey, get in touch and we’ll consider adding it.