A check-in with Edmonton YouTuber Bricksie, famous for his ever-expanding Lego city 

CTV News Edmonton's Matt Woodman goes behind the scenes with YouTuber Bricksie to get a firsthand look at his Lego city.

A local YouTuber’s Lego collection has now become a city within a city.

Jordan Forsythe, known online as Bricksie, first made headlines for his Lego collection in 2021. Since then, the block replica of a city he’s built has outgrown his basement.

He calls it Brickmonton, and it spans 75 square metres and millions of pieces. He says he’s lost count of the mini figurines inside the model. Brickmonton features a downtown core, a beach, a harbour, train yard, campground, zoo and amusement park, among other things.

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“It was like, ‘What are we going to do?’” he told CTV News Edmonton of his city expansion dilemma. “We can’t continue to grow at this pace; we need to either get a bigger space or downsize our collection.

“So we decided to get a bigger space.”

Bricksie and his wife started building Lego models 10 years ago with a Star Wars set. Since then, their collection has grown to roughly 1,500 sets.

“It snowballed pretty quickly and as soon as we bought our first modular building, I knew one day I would be building a Lego city,” he added.

In 2020, he and his wife would see a massive takeoff in YouTube views – allowing them to quit their jobs and focus on Lego full-time. The studio they work in is closed to the public, but their videos allow access to the tiniest details.

Brickmonton also isn’t immune to tariffs from the United States. Lego, a Danish company, is no longer shipping certain pieces to North America. Bricksie says that, for the most part, the pieces he needs are still available.

Bricksie says he still finds the work therapeutic, if not occasionally repetitive.

“It is so much fun just building Lego every day and making videos about it,” he said. And so Bricksie keeps on building.