Foreign Bridge

The Foreign Bridge once crossed the river Severn in Gloucester but over time the course of the river changed, these channels silted up and the bridge became obsolete. Parts of the foundations are now under a roundabout as you enter the centre of Gloucester. We worked from scale plans to create the main bridge as well as the bank edges. On the right of the build (the side with the houses on the bridge) would be where Gloucester started and would have had buildings more or less up to the river side. Unfortunately we didn’t have quite enough room to include those on this build. One of the biggest challenges on this build was the fact that the arches of the bridge don’t conform to a set width, they were all different lengths depending on the width of each channel which meant we had to figure out a way to have similar style arches but in varying lengths. We have tried to capture the busy nature of what was once one of Gloucester’s main bridges.

Gloucester Roman Forum

The Roman Forum of Gloucester proved to be quite a challenging build. Not because there was anything particularly technical involved with the build, more just the sheer number of individual parts that were required. A good example of this is the roof tiles which number more than 5000 2×2 tiles. The Forum was the centre of Roman administration in Gloucester, and as part of the brief we were asked if we could include cut away sections to enable visitors to be able to ‘see’ into the Basilica, where an official is informing the people of Gloucester about a new tax….or possible a discussion about problems with seagulls, no one can be sure. A lot of the build was quite repetitive, Roman’s following instructions to the letter where possible, but the biggest challenge was making the build easily transportable, as it would have been quite hard to build as individual base-plates so it had to be created in sections of varying sizes.

Medieval Westgate Street

This was an interesting build due to the fact that effectively Westgate street was a street of three parts. When we first approached the initial brief it was to build the entire street, which would have been quite cost prohibitive due to the large number of buildings involved as well as issues from a visual/viewing standpoint. In order to make it easier for the public to be able to ‘see’ how the street was laid out and to enable a focus on the important buildings that lined the centre of the street we decided that the best approach would be to have one side of the street as building frontages, the centre buildings in full and then to remove the buildings from the other side of the street entirely as this could easily be shown on the accompanying information boards which were made for the exhibition period. This allowed the centre buildings to be much more visable and also allowed a view down the length of the street plus interior views of several of the house which lined the street. There were quite a few challenges involved with this build, most noticeably the High Cross which was quite hard to re-create with the limited number of parts that are available in LEGO® bricks.