At the time of this article being published, 90 attendees from seven countries are ascending on the city of Trondheim, Norway, for the ninth edition of “På Kloss Hold”. This is the story of how what we believe is the world’s northernmost major LEGO convention came to be.

No, this is not a picture from the activities of På Kloss Hold. We did have a mammoth in our goodie bag one year though…

Disclaimer! If you know of any LEGO conventions - of a certain size, of course - that are located further north than Trondheim, please reach out! Maybe there’s something going on in Reykjavik, Oulu or Fairbanks that we don’t know of…

(Correction, dated January, 2023: There are apparently, or have been, events in both Norway, Sweden and Finland that are based farther north, so I’ve amended the article’s title to “major” LEGO convention, as in a) annual, b) international, and c) drawing 100+ exhibitors on a regular basis.)

The picture above, from the Arctic subtheme of LEGO’s 2018 City line, might possibly be what comes to mind when you find out that Trondheim is located, as the crow flies (and it does, even this far north), just 560 kilometres, or roughly 350 miles, south of the Arctic Circle. But despite that, the climate is quite good—normally, when the event is held in April (we’ll get back to that in Part 2) the temperatures can approach 20 degrees Celsius (68 F) during the day. This is due to the North Atlantic Current, the northern extension of the Gulf Stream, which brings warm water north, again heating up the air.

Norway, with the needle stuck in Trondheim.

So, where is Trondheim, I hear you ask? If you were to drive from the south of Norway all the way to the North Cape, which is the northernmost part of Europe that can be reached by car, you’d be a bit short of half way when you reached Trondheim (Norway is a long country). It’s located at 63.5 degrees north. Anchorage, the most populous settlement in Alaska, is at 61.3 and the Arctic Circle at 65.5, so this might sound remote, but there are some 20-ish different flights from Oslo to Trondheim on any given weekday.

The reason why our one big annual event ended up there in the first place was really a coincidence: Five of the most active members of our LUG, Brikkelauget, were located there and collaborated on a little display at a local model railroad exhibition. After the event Harald Kvande, who runs the event today in cooperation with myself (but certainly does the most work onsite because he actually lives there), said to the others, “Hey, wait, we have enough LEGO between us to fill a small sports hall, and I just happen to have access to one. Want to make an exhibition?” and when that idea eventually turned into something concrete, the LUG’s annual general assembly was merged with it because people were going there anyway. It all snowballed (good choice of word this far north) from there.

The eventees at the very first PKH back in 2012. A nice little bunch, really, featuring one of the current organisers, a LEGO Certified Professional, a current LEGO Masters participant, and an Iron Builder winner. Photo by Øyvind Steinnes

The Slow Start

It snowballed quite slowly, though. The first year there were seventeen registered AFOLs, and judging from the picture above, they seem to have enjoyed it. During a few hours on the Sunday, which was the only time the event was open to the public (the AGM and AFOL socialising was the top priority for the rest of the weekend), around 400 visitors stopped by to have a look at the nice little exhibition.

The event was given the name “På Kloss Hold”, which is a play on words: It literally means “up close”, but “kloss” is also the Norwegian word for “brick”. It is often abbreviated to PKH—which is easier for international visitors, but there weren’t any of those for the first year. 2013 was my first time there, and Megan Rothrock who was there with me to promote the first LEGO Adventure Book (more about that in my previous article) was, I believe, the first international attendee—but still, all information and public announcements were in Norwegian.

From PKH 2013. Note Morten’s huge Royal Palace, featured in my first BrickNerd article! Photo by Andreas Lund Hånstad

After the third edition of the event in 2014, at which point the number of registered attendees had grown to 42, a bit of event fatigue set in among the organising team in Trondheim. They weren’t ready to sign up for another year, and as a result the board of our LUG went looking for somebody to host PKH somewhere else in Norway. In the end, the 2015 event ended up at a place closer to Oslo, with similar attendance numbers—not that surprising, because even though a lot more people live in and around the capital, it takes time to build an event in a new location.

Complete Chaos

The following year, I teamed up with Harald to form an organiser duo. We’d got to know each other quite well and realised we were a good match as a team as we’re good at different things and are also able to cooperate without too much friction between us (albeit with a whole lot of friendly banter). The event returned to Trondheim in 2016, and we had really no idea as to what kind of visitor numbers to expect. Our record was around 1,800 from 2013, but we had a slight decline the following year and after the event having been away for a year, we thought we were being a bit optimistic when we planned for 1,600.

And then 4,500 people showed up.

We didn’t expect to raise our attendance record by 146%… Photo by Eduard Petrač

It was mayhem, obviously. Mainly because there was no way for that many people to park their cars close to our lovely venue (an almost new high school with big windows and a very spacious interior), so that caused the most chaos. In addition to that, it took a bit too long for us to get people through the doors, so we ended up with a long queue of people waiting to get in—and the event was still open for only five hours.

Luckily, most of them understood that there was just no way we could have predicted this, so the mood outside the hall was surprisingly good. When some people wrote on our Facebook page that they had been outside, seen the crowds and decided to go somewhere else, other people replied:

“Standing in queue was cold, but worth it! Great exhibition.”

“The line is much shorter now! Come back!”

“Stay in line. The display is worth it.”

“Worth queueing for. Best regards, Sweaty Mom with Happy Kids.”

This was right after the event opened. It was going to get more crowded.

Changes on the Horizon

When the dust settled on Sunday evening and everything had been cleaned up, it was certainly beyond any doubt that having an event of this size in Trondheim was sustainable. But then the board of our LUG decided that they wanted the event to move around and not stay put in Trondheim, in order to make it easier for people from other parts of the country to attend. And sure enough, the 2017 event was moved elsewhere.

Then, in December, some unforeseen life events suddenly made it impossible for the guy who was in charge of PKH to spend that much time on it. This was obviously not his fault and something that could have happened to anyone at any point, but the big problem was that there were simply no other local volunteers that could take his place.

The solution that our LUG board came up with… was Trondheim! Which meant that we were asked, very politely and cautiously, if it would be possible for us to take on the challenge of hosting it in Trondheim again… with four months’ notice.

Above: Some impressions from PKH 2016. Click for bigger versions. Photos by Eduard Petrač

Back for Good

An exhibitor going the extra mile to make sure a kid can see properly. And no, it’s not his kid.

Now, we hadn’t been particularly keen on the idea of it moving in the first place. And this certainly wasn’t because we didn’t want events to be held in other parts of the country—on the contrary, we were convinced that Norway was big enough for more than one annual event, so we would happily have seen another one added—but now that PKH had been so firmly established in Trondheim, with a big visitor base, we thought it would be better if that stayed there.

So on the condition that we’d be able to count on it being in Trondheim every year (because making annual arrangements is so much easier) we agreed to host the 2017 edition there, and promptly got to work on making some necessary changes. And this is really when the PKH that exists today was born.

In tomorrow’s BrickNerd article, I will explain what happened next, and how we turned the event into what several of our returning attendees refer to (and I’m blushing as I’m writing this) as one of the best LEGO conventions they’ve been to…

På Kloss Hold 2019. My oh my, how you have grown! Photo by Tomáš Kašpařík

What is the most exotic LEGO event you’ve visited? Have you been to Trondheim? Was this cliffhanger too much for you? Will you be able to sleep tonight, eagerly anticipating the sequel? Let us know in the comments (but quickly! Part two will be out tomorrow)!

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