Peter Grant: LEGO Man
Gulf of Georgia Cannery, Richmond, BC - Ongoing
For children of the 1960s, LEGO was an ever-growing box of interlocking red and white plastic bricks of various sizes, a toy for which there were no written or visual instructions. Participants simply assembled the pieces, and the result was the sculptural equivalent of doodling. Today, you can purchase a LEGO kit containing the pieces for a scaled-down version of Notre-Dame de Paris. Whatever happened to taking inspiration from your immediate surroundings? Peter Grant has done just that with his 1:1200 scale model of Richmond, BC's Gulf of Georgia Cannery.
Known to many local residents as “LEGO Man,” Grant has recreated more than 30 historic building using the full range of today’s LEGO products. Many of these recreations are set in Richmond’s historic Steveston district, once a thriving multicultural salmon canning town. In addition to the Gulf of Georgia Cannery, highlights include the Steveston Tram, Steveston Museum and Post Office, and the stilt houses of the Britannia Shipyards National Historic Site.
In a 2024 interview with the Richmond News, Grant spoke of his projects requiring between three and four months to complete, with the 55,000-piece Gulf of Georgia Cannery taking almost twice that. “The cannery has been on my radar for years, but it was such a daunting project, I really didn’t know where to start. That changed when the cannery’s CEO, Elizabeth Batista, reached out to me in late 2022.”
As with previous projects, Grant admits to taking some “artistic licence,” mostly with respect to cannery activities (unloading, shipping, etc.) common to a typical week of processing. “While none of those things were happening at the same time … to me, these are all important stories to capture.”
