Modular Buildings

Police Station

The 16th modular packs a proper crime story into three tidy shopfronts.

4.3/5

Set 10278 · 2021

Pieces2,923

Minifigs5

Year2021

Set number10278

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The verdict

If you love the Modular Buildings line, this one earns its shelf spot without you having to think twice.

It's a friendly, mostly relaxed build with a fun cops-and-donuts story woven through it, and it slots neatly next to the Detective's Office and Brick Bank. The minifig lineup is a bit thin and it's now retired so prices have climbed, but as a display piece it holds up beautifully. Grab it if you can find it near a fair price.

Best for: Modular collectors who want a story-driven building for their LEGO street

The full review

What it is

The Police Station is the 16th entry in LEGO's long-running Modular Buildings Collection, and it's the LEGO® set that a lot of people point to as their gateway into the whole modular obsession. Across a standard 32-stud base you get three buildings crammed together: the police station itself in the middle, an 8-wide donut shop on one side, and a narrow 6-wide newsstand on the other. That mix of widths and architectural styles is what makes the front so much fun to look at, and it stops the whole thing feeling like one flat wall. Designer Chris McVeigh leaned hard into storytelling here, so this isn't just a pretty box. There's a donut-theft caper running through the model, a case board with actual red string connecting the clues, a jail cell (with a cheeky escape tunnel hidden under the bed), an interrogation room, an evidence locker, and a reel-to-reel recorder. Poke around the interior and you keep finding little jokes and details that reward you for looking.

The catch

Now for the honest bits. The minifig count is five, and that's on the low side for a 2,923-piece set. You get two 1940s-era officers (one smirking, one with a moustache), a female officer who's cleverly designed as the highest-ranking one, a donut shop clerk, and the newsstand operator (who happens to be the pastry thief). They're fine, but they're short on accessories and the lineup feels like a missed chance to pack in more characters. There are packaging gripes too: the switch to the plain black 18+ box put some longtime fans off, and a handful of builders found the dark instruction pages tricky to read. The bigger catch today is availability. This set retired at the end of 2023, so it's off shelves and the aftermarket price has drifted well north of the original 199.99. You'll pay a premium now.

Who it's for

So who's this for? If you're building a modular street, this is close to essential. It sits right in the top handful of the collection for most reviewers, and the 4.3 community rating on Brickset backs that up. The way it continues the cookie-smuggling gag from the Detective's Office and nods to the Brick Bank makes it feel like part of a real neighbourhood rather than a standalone. Newcomers to the line will find it approachable and satisfying, and longtime collectors get the story callbacks they love. If you only want one modular and you're chasing the absolute best value, you might wait for a cheaper entry point or look at a currently available modular instead. But if you want it, and you can stomach the retired-set pricing, you won't regret adding it to the row.

The parts story

What the build is actually like, and the pieces worth knowing about.

Building it is a comfortable, steady experience rather than a white-knuckle challenge, which is exactly why it works so well as a first modular. You build each of the three floors and connect them with a grand central staircase, and the pacing keeps things moving with regular little payoff moments. Reviewers kept calling out the small wow-techniques scattered through the build: the faceted brickwork on the staircase, a clever vine, and a neat water cooler among them. The ground floor and its shopfronts come together quickly, then the upper floors layer in the interrogation and evidence rooms. It's the kind of set where you happily lose an evening or two and stop every so often to admire how a section was put together.

For parts nerds there's real value here. New Elementary flagged a brand-new 1x3 concave slope that debuts in this set, with at least a dozen appearing on the roof in light bluish grey plus a few more in tan inside the dividing walls. There are around 11 recoloured and printed elements to hunt for, including the 2x2 gear plate in green used a dozen times for the tree foliage flanking the main door, a couple of pieces in the ultra-rare nougat colour, blank animal-head elements repurposed for cornice detailing, and printed bits like the case board, billboard, and newspaper. At roughly seven cents a piece against the original RRP, the part-count value was solid at launch, and the mix of new molds, recolors, and useful printed tiles makes it a genuine treasure chest for MOC builders.

Fun facts

01This is the 16th building in the Modular Buildings Collection and was designed by Chris McVeigh, who joined LEGO in 2019 after years as a well-known fan builder.
02The set continues an ongoing running joke: the cookie and donut smuggling story that started in the Detective's Office carries over here, and the billboard ties it back to the Brick Bank.
03The real culprit in the set's crime story is the newsstand operator, who's swiping pastries from the donut shop next door to invent his own headlines.
04The three shopfronts are built at different widths (a 6-wide newsstand, the central station, and an 8-wide donut shop) so the whole 32-stud facade shows off three different architectural styles at once.