The Sunken Treasure Trove of LEGOs

Almost five million LEGO pieces escaped into the sea off the coast of Cornwall, UK, spilled from a cargo ship that was bound for New York in the US after setting sail from Rotterdam in the Netherlands on February 13, 1997. 

The Tokio Express had been hit by a freak storm and it overturned about 20 miles off Land's End and the container of LEGO, one of just 62 fell into the water. 

Many of the pieces, coincidentally, were sea-themed: flippers, octopuses, life jackets, spear guns, cutlasses, sharks and scuba tanks – and thousands of them made their way to the shoreline to be found bobbing in rockpools and strewn across the sand. There were also witches’ hats, wands, brooms and more. 

And many were barely unchanged by the passage of time and a life under the waves. 

They quickly became a treasure trove for beachcombers and even today, these tiny plastic passengers can still be found washed up on the beaches across the south west coast of England. 

One forager, Tracey Williams from Cornwall has been documenting her finds for years through her LEGO Lost At Sea social media accounts – and in a new 2022 book, “Adrift: The Curious Tale Of The LEGO Lost At Sea”, she tells the story of how a cargo spill of the toys twenty-five years ago, opened her eyes to the problem of plastic in our oceans. 

In fact, LEGO pieces were found on the Gower peninsula in Wales, County Kerry in Ireland, Kent and Guernsey. Some made their way to France and Belgium and some even returned to Holland. 

It’s not only LEGO items – there are others too:

As part of her research, Williams teamed up with scientists at the University of Plymouth to test how long LEGO could last in the sea. They concluded between 100 and 1,300 years.

She shared two photos of LEGO bricks on social media, one a sample provided in 1997, the other discovered in a fisherman's net at the end of January.

"There's not much difference between them", she says. 

"[The brick from the spill] has got a few marine creatures living on it but it's still in perfect condition. I think what's shocking me now is realising how much [plastic] is actually lying on the seabed because I think very often you only really see and hear about the plastic that washes ashore. 

If there's a cargo spill, there's usually reports of what's washing up but there's never any mention of all the items that sank to the bottom of the sea. I think it's assumed that it's almost gone forever and lost without trace. But we know from the LEGO that it's all still there".