LEGO designers are ‘rethinking how we approach’ LEGO City in 2024

LEGO City’s new Design Manager has revealed how the team is rethinking its approach to the theme in 2024 – and how Thunderbirds inspired one specific direction for this year’s sets…

The LEGO Group refreshed several of its core homegrown themes in 2023, including LEGO City, which is now under the purview of Creative Lead Simon Lucas. And he’s since pulled his former LEGO NINJAGO Movie colleague Chris Stamp, who was most recently working as a Design Manager for LEGO Speed Champions, into the LEGO City orbit.

Chris is serving the same role on the LEGO City team, pushing his fellow designers to new creative extremes, and 2024 marks the first full year of new products under his supervision. He’s now shared exactly how he’s worked with Simon and his fellow designers to breathe new life into LEGO City.

“I’ve been brought in to take a bit of that thinking that you guys have now become a little bit aware of with Speed Champions, to try to put that into the City environment, and rethink how we approach police and fire and our construction vehicles,” Chris told RacingBrick. It was under his management that Speed Champions switched from six-studs-wide to eight-wide cars, and as a theme it’s since gone from strength to strength – leading to a record-breaking 2024.

It’s not difficult to see why Simon wanted him aboard the LEGO City express, and Chris’s involvement is already starting to bear fruit. “Hopefully you can see a few different aesthetic changes, functional changes, element choices, how we’re applying graphics in certain places, if it’s more decorations than stickers, all these different things,” he said. “Hopefully you’ll see that when you’re playing with our toys.”

One of the biggest changes Chris and the team have implemented in 2024 is greater cohesion across the entire portfolio. It’s something we’ve seen in other themes, including Star Wars, NINJAGO and Friends: a drive to make sure everything feels connected under one unifying banner.

“What we’ve tried to do, and one of the things that Simon and I have pushed quite a lot, is make this feel like a complete world,” Chris explained. “So for example, when we’re using brands we want to keep mentioning them. If you’re creating a world, that needs to feel real. And how does it feel real? Well, if you’ve got a go-kart event happening over there, you need to advertise it. So maybe we can reference that in the harbour.

“If we’re doing Robot World, maybe you can reference it on the tourist bus that goes all the way around the city. So there’s a few of those areas where we don’t want to approach these as standalone sets anymore. We’re trying to really think of them as a collective city, and as a collective story. So even if you pick up a fire engine and Robot World, you can play with those two together completely, and there’s nothing stopping you.”

As Chris alludes to there, you’ll find those references dotted around this summer’s LEGO City sets, including 60421 Robot World Roller-Coaster Park, 60407 Red Double-Decker Sightseeing Bus, 60422 Seaside Harbour with Cargo Ship and more. But one thing you might also notice in this year’s sets is a greater sense of aesthetic harmony between models, which shouldn’t come as a surprise given Chris’s Speed Champions background.

He specifically points out that the team has ‘tried to make all of the vehicles feel like they follow the same design language, not just the same colour palette’, for example. But beyond those broad strokes, those early conversations around aesthetics also dug into the specifics of these sets – and inspiration for one specific tweak came from an unusual source.

“We were still finding our feet on this new journey,” Chris recalled. “We were saying, ‘How do we elevate the aesthetics a little bit?’ For example, with the fire assortment, something that inspired me was Thunderbirds. You’ll notice our fire vehicles [have] all got a number – so this is vehicle one, this is vehicle two, this is vehicle three, four, five. We can pull that inspiration from anywhere.”

Check out the table below for a complete round-up of all this year’s LEGO City sets, which encompass subthemes including construction, jungle exploration, emergency services, civilian life and more.

LEGO City 2024 sets

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