There is a particular moment when you walk into a hall and simply do not know where to look first. That is exactly how Sunday started for me at the Hamme Forum in Ritterhude.
Hamme Bricks, second edition, run by Bricks am Meer e. V. — a LEGO-recognised fan group from the north-west of Germany. Two days, ten till six, five euros to get in and four for children. It sounds like a modest little event. It is not.
A village at the front, and no end behind it
Right by the entrance stood this ring-walled village: a palisade of brown bricks, a red keep, a handful of half-timbered houses, a moat all the way round and a meadow where somebody has quite obviously placed every single blade of grass by hand. Behind it, table after table — and a banner for Brick Teams Westfalen, which tells you this is not just the neighbourhood showing up.
What gets me about models like this is never the size. It is the point at which somebody stopped being sensible. On the castle gate, that point was the drawbridge:
Chain, planks, a knight halfway across — and a small blue creature with enormous eyes trotting along behind him. Nobody asks for that. Somebody just wanted it there.
From Doctor Who to a camper van on stilts
The lovely thing about a fan exhibition is the range. Within twenty paces there was a Doctor Who corner with its own backdrop, the time display from Back to the Future alongside a parade of DeLoreans, a Christmas window with an enormous Santa built out of bricks, a little rose tree made entirely of red blooms — and then this:
A VW camper van. On AT-AT legs. There is no sensible reason for it, and that is precisely why it is good.
The small things
If I am honest, I spent longest standing in front of the unremarkable things. This flower meadow, for instance, somewhere between the daisies and the sunflowers — with a little blackboard planted in the middle of it:
Bee school. Three sums, a stick figure drawn beside them — and in front, a minifigure in a bee costume who looks like she got all three right. Nobody builds an entire meadow for a detail like that. Except that somebody did.
And then there was a board for Mensch ärgere dich nicht — the German cousin of Ludo — built entirely from bricks, with a flower border and fat little playing pieces. Next to it, quite casually, the real boxed game for comparison:
The railway
The big layout is where I lost the most time. Freight trains, a platform crowded with minifigures, a winter village, fields of lavender and sunflowers, a red tractor — and straight through the middle of it a London sightseeing bus and an elephant with two calves, ambling across the tracks without a care.
That, for me, is the difference between a layout and a world: somebody decided that elephants are allowed to walk over the rails here.
The hosts
On the Bricks am Meer stand, next to the mascot — a blue brick with eyes — stood a small robot who looks like he has just come back from a very long day at work:
There was also a large hands-on area with bricks to dig through, a Duplo table for the smallest visitors, a LEGO Pokémon station and two traders. Everything a day like this needs, in other words.
Why I was there
Not purely to look, if I am honest. I am building BrickDb at the moment, and a day like this shows you rather directly what it is meant to be for: people who know exactly which part they are missing for their next model — and who still have to dig through three boxes to find it.
But that is a different post. This one is about a Sunday morning on which I took forty photographs in ten minutes and still came away feeling I had missed half of it.
There is meant to be another one in 2027. I will be back — and next time I will stay longer.
The details
| What | Hamme Bricks 2026 — LEGO® fan exhibition |
| When | 19 and 20 September 2026, 10:00–18:00 each day |
| Where | Hamme Forum, Riesstraße 11, 27721 Ritterhude, Germany |
| Organiser | Bricks am Meer e. V., a recognised LEGO User Group |
| Admission | €5 for adults, €4 for children |
LEGO® is a trademark of the LEGO Group, which does not sponsor or endorse this site. All photographs are my own, taken on 20 September 2026; the models belong to the people who built them.