Exactly the same set is on display in the Lego Idea House in Billund, the front of the box adorned with a carefree 1960s kid in a home-knitted sweater who could almost, bar the unnaturally blond curls, have been me. Bits of it are still in a chest at my parents' house: a grey plastic base board, an assortment of rectangular red-and-white bricks, a few square ones, roof tiles, beams, a little door that opens and shuts, a red-framed window with three transparent panes, red wheels with grey rubber tyres. I got my first Lego set at the age of five. But there's a bit too much of it around here even for me.' 'I'm nuts about Lego, believe me I eat, sleep and breathe the stuff.

'I couldn't ever live here,' admits Mads Nipper, who looks and - when it comes to plastic bricks - acts about 12, but turns out to be one of the company's executive vice-presidents. Its home town, though, is a bit too much for some people. In Britain alone, the company's turnover last year was up 51%. For Lego, born of an earlier and tougher depression, is positively revelling in this one: the little studded, primary-coloured bricks are selling like never before. My goal here is to find out how, in the teeth of global recession and barely five years since it was being read the last rites, one of the world's best-loved brands has come back from the dead. I half-expect to be plucked from the pavement, brushed up a bit and plumped down in front of the smart rectangular building labelled Head Office: Lego A/S. A jovial red-and-yellow Lego giant points towards the town centre huge coloured bricks lie scattered as if awaiting deployment in some exemplary new civic amenity (except that, being Denmark, it's not immediately apparent what else the town might need).

Unostentatious automobiles proceed slowly along all-but-empty roads, stopping politely for pedestrians nowhere near a zebra crossing. You can't help but feel a master intelligence is at work here - the place is so manifestly wholesome, the street plan so well ordered, the pavements so tidy. I t's quite easy, wandering round the small town of Billund, to start believing in the existence of a Lego god.

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