The fact that Lego is still the top toy in Britain after the best part of half a century should come as little surprise. Children everywhere might be bombarded with the idea that they're meant to be products of the all-consuming digital-electronic-computer-txt msging-iPod world, yet nothing, it seems, beats the elemental pleasure of placing bricks together and creating worlds of their very own. When those bricks fit together as precisely and as enjoyably as Lego's do, and offer the sheer variety of plastic-bricky joy as the latest Lego sets do, then the gently instructive pleasure is simply all the more.
Lego is one of those toys that adults can happily play with alongside children without getting bored. It is a toy of gentle genius and one that goes to prove that very many of us, of all ages, in a country devoted to not making things and shutting up its traditional manufacturing industries as quickly as commercially possible, enjoy making things.
If the Lego experience was played out on a wholly adult, manufacturing scale, we would still be happily making locomotives, ships, aircraft and Brunel only knows what, rather than muddling our way disgruntledly through an economic life given over increasingly to shopping and, if not shopping, then stacking shelves and buying cars to fill up with costly petrol to drive to supermarkets to shop some more. Making things makes us content and even happy and Ole Kirk Christiansen (1891-1958), a Danish carpenter and inventor of Lego appears to have known this intuitively.
Lego, from the Danish "leg godt", or play well, has done rather well since the company was founded in 1934, making wooden building bricks for children, turning to plastic in 1949. The richest person in Denmark today is Kjeld Kirk Kristiansen, grandson of Ole, and Lego's CEO from 1979 to 2004. Some 20 million bricks are made each year – not in China, or at least not yet anyway – and each brick connects with every other made, to the same scale, since the plastic technology was perfected in 1963. Lego likes to say that sufficient bricks have been made since 1963 for every person in the world to own more than 60; that means some of you out there must own thousands.
While it's true that Lego has been cashing in on fashionable film tie-in and other crazes in recent years, creating toys based on Star Wars, Harry Potter and other heavily marketed children's favourites, the basic bricks still allow, and encourage, fresh generations of children to think and play and to make things for themselves.
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, the famous German-American architect said that "architecture began when two bricks were put together", and while it takes a bit more than that to make a good architect, Lego is one of those toys that, by encouraging us all to put bricks together well, should encourage us to think as we build and to shape and nurture intelligent forms, structures and worlds.
The one dark shadow in the Lego story is the sorry tale of Hilary Fisher Page, the British inventor whose Kiddicraft Self-Locking Building Bricks, first produced in 1947, were a key inspiration for Ole Kirk Christiansen when he turned his original wooden building blocks into plastic and to gold, as it were. Page committed suicide three years before Lego captured the British childhood imagination, and toy market; I've long wondered if he had seen the writing on the wall. If he did, it spelled Lego rather than Kiddicraft.
Whatever happened to Page, Lego thrived and went on to win the coveted Toy of the Century award in 1999. And, even if you are so much a creature of the digital-keyboard age that you're incapable of making interesting structures from Lego, or simply can't see the point of making anything when low-paid foreigners can do this for us, the sheer pleasure of fumbling through a box of assorted Lego – the feel, the sound – is one that you might just enjoy. I have a feeling that even British children brought up on a diet of shopping and computer games, might just continue to play with interlocking building bricks for many decades to come.