Outdoor
Yester Estate Country Fireworks Night
Today · 4:30pm · Yester Estate
There is something quietly fitting about visitors clicking LEGO bricks together with Scotland's Concorde right there beside them. That, in a sentence, is Awesome Bricks: everyday bricks built into aircraft in the shadow of some of the biggest aircraft the country has ever flown.
The event returns to the National Museum of Flight at East Fortune every Father's Day weekend, and this year marks its ninth outing. Created with LEGO experts Warren and Teresa Elsmore, it hands the museum's hangars over to two days of building, brilliant fan displays and hands-on fun for every age.
A Concorde mosaic, fifty years on
This year's centrepiece is a giant Concorde mosaic, put together brick by brick by visitors across the weekend. It is a fitting choice, because 2026 is the 50th anniversary of Concorde's first commercial flight, and the museum is home to Scotland's own Concorde. While it is part-built, the numbered baseplates still show through in places, which is rather the point. You do not come to see it finished. You come to add a few bricks of your own and watch it grow.
The building is the heart of it
The real draw is getting stuck in, and it pulls in all ages. There is a brick build zone stocked with tens of thousands of bricks, where anyone can sit down and make something, with no shortage of room to do it. There is a speed build challenge for the competitive, a minifigure hunt that sends explorers off around the museum, and, for the littlest hands, an Awesomeville and a DUPLO area for under-fives. Everyone from toddlers to teenagers gets happily lost in it.
Where the grown-up fans show off
Then there are the displays, and this is where the adult LEGO builders come into their own. A sprawling harbour and port, complete with container ships and dockside cranes, sits beneath a sign politely warning that the models are old and fragile. A working train layout winds its way around a whole miniature town. Another table goes full science fiction, all black-and-yellow spacecraft and a deep red Martian landscape. It is a good reminder that LEGO is not only for the youngest people in the room.
The practical side
Arriving is easy on a bright day, with a short wait at the car and a very open site to wander, and it is fairly manageable with a buggy. The event gets busier as the afternoon goes on, so for quieter build tables, aim to go earlier. The museum café is on the pricier side, so it is worth packing your own and spreading out on the wide grassy areas outside. Kitchen Street, a Glasgow street food truck, has also been parked up on site for anyone who would rather grab something there.
Worth it?
Awesome Bricks is a genuinely good day out for the whole family, whatever age your kids are. Younger children are well looked after, with a three-year-old finding plenty to do and under-fives going free, but there is just as much to pull in older kids, teenagers and grown-up LEGO fans, from the speed build challenge to the showstopper fan builds. Add in the rest of the museum, with its hangars full of real aircraft, and you can happily make a half or full day of it.
Need to know
Awesome Bricks runs over the Father's Day weekend each year (in 2026, Saturday 20 and Sunday 21 June), 10am to 5pm. Tickets are £18 adult, £16 over-65s, £15 concession, £13 child aged 5 to 15, and free for under 5s. Book children's and adults' tickets together and a 15% family discount is applied automatically at the checkout. The wider museum is open daily, 10am to 5pm, April to October, with last entry an hour before. Book at nms.ac.uk.
Listings
More family days out in East Lothian
5 things to do · longer runs grouped
