Lego to the beach.........

Pictured: The giant 8ft Lego man who washed up on the beach

At 8ft tall and wearing a garish green jersey he's not the sort of chap to get lost down the sofa.

In fact, you'd think he was unlikely to get lost at all. But someone (possibly someone big), somewhere is missing a key bit of their Lego set.

The colourful character mysteriously washed up on Brighton beach yesterday spawning dozens of tales - soon to become local legend - about where he may have come from.

Stand-up comedy: Bemused children heave the brightly coloured figure upright

While some believe he floated from Denmark-where there is a Legoland park), others suggest he toppled off a ship. Of course, there's always the cynical possibility he's part of a publicity stunt.

Resident Gerry Turner, 34, said: 'It's very odd. God knows how it got here but people are saying it's from Holland because it's got some Dutch writing on it.

'It must have fallen off a boat of something. The kids love it.'

Children who helped stand the Lego man up on the beach were desperately curious about where it came from.

One said: 'It's great, but we don't know why it's here.'

Castaway: The giant Lego man lies where he washed up on Brighton beach

A spokesman for Brighton and Hove City Council said town hall officials had no idea of the origin of the Lego man, but added that they saw no difficulty in letting it stay on the beach where it washed up.

He said: 'There's no problem at all. It will be interesting to see how long the Lego man stays there for. We'll keep an eye on it.'

But Lego was insistent: 'We're bemused. He has nothing to do with us.'

The Lego giant's arrival on the East Sussex shingle yesterday morning comes two years after an armada of plastic ducks landed on British shores.

Borne on the ocean currents, the ducks had made a 17,000-mile odyssey from the Pacific where they had been washed from a container ship in a 1992 storm.