LEGO Alleyway MOC: Dressing the Back of the Street

Every LEGO city has a front and a back. The front gets the shop windows, the awnings and the signs. The back is where the bins live, and in a real town it is the part with the most character. A LEGO alleyway MOC is the easiest way to show it: it is small, it costs very few bricks, and it fills a gap you probably already have between two modular buildings.

Start with the gap you already have

Modular buildings sit on 32 by 32 stud baseplates with a pavement about eight studs deep, and they pin together side by side, so a row of them leaves no gap at all. Pull two apart by eight studs, one 8x32 strip of plates, and you have an alley. Carry the pavement across the mouth so it reads as the same street, then let the ground change behind it: darker tiles, a drain cover, a kerb that simply stops.

Give every door a job

An alley is made of service doors, and each one belongs to a shop round the front. The bakery takes its flour through a roller shutter. The café has a fire exit with a bar across it. Once every door has an owner, the alley stops being empty space and becomes the other side of buildings people already know.

The flat surfaces are where the story goes

The backs of buildings are full of flat things: roller shutters, boarded windows, electrical cabinets, hoardings and bin stores. A brick wall gives you nowhere to put a detail, but a tile does, and those flat surfaces are exactly where a street leaves its marks. A 2x4 tile is a shutter panel. A 4x4 is a patch of hoarding.

Put street art where someone would actually paint it

Real graffiti is never spread evenly. It collects on shutters that stay down at night, on bin stores, on hoardings nobody owns, and low on walls within reach of an arm. Give the alley one bigger piece on the shutter and two or three small ones lower down, and keep the shop fronts on the street side clean. That contrast is what tells the viewer they have stepped round the back.

Our Street Art & Graffiti sticker sheet was made for those surfaces. Each of its 54 stencil pieces is painted onto its own wall, whether that is red brick, painted brick, a roller shutter, boarded wood or torn posters, so a plain tile arrives looking like part of the alley. You cut them out yourself, and they come in 2x2, 2x3, 2x4 and 4x4 sizes.

Light it from the street end

An alley is darker than the street it opens onto, so photograph it that way. Stand at the pavement, get the camera down to minifigure height, and let the light come from the open end behind you. Let the far end of the alley fall into shadow. That shadow does more work than any extra brick.

If a door in your alley needs a sign, a delivery notice or the name of the shop it belongs to, we print custom LEGO stickers to order. And for the building fronts either side, our guide to detailing a modular building covers the street side.