Some people retire and quietly reduce. Their worlds get smaller. Their routines tighter. Their days… manageable.
Honey, I Shrunk the Kids imagined the opposite: a world where the ordinary becomes vast, overwhelming, faintly threatening. A blade of grass becomes a jungle. A crumb becomes a landscape. Childhood, briefly, feels like survival.
In Peterborough, one man has recreated that sensation—deliberately, methodically, and with a tape measure that may or may not also be a coffee table.
A Quiet Revolt Against Smallness
At 62, Steve Wainwright did what many do: he stopped working. His final role had been with the East of England Ambulance Service—a job defined by urgency, motion, consequence.
Then came stillness.
“Once retired you can only cook and clean for so many hours,” he said, which feels less like a complaint and more like a diagnosis.
So he began building.
Not furniture. Not models. Something stranger: replicas of everyday objects—pencils, cassette tapes, clothes pegs, plugs—scaled up to roughly ten times their normal size.
Why ten times?
“Because I’m not very good at maths.”
It’s a line that lands like a joke, but underneath it sits something else. A refusal to be precise. A willingness to distort reality just enough that it becomes uncanny.
The Uncanny Domestic
There is something faintly disquieting about a five-foot HB pencil.
Not because it’s dangerous—but because it shouldn’t exist.
A pencil is supposed to be handled. Controlled. Forgotten behind ears and found in drawers. Enlarge it, and it becomes something else entirely: a monument to usefulness, stripped of its function and turned into spectacle.
Wainwright’s objects sit in that uneasy space between practical and absurd.
A tape measure becomes a coffee table.
A 13-amp plug becomes a cupboard.
They work. But they also don’t, at least not in the way your brain expects. This is the trick. Scale is one of the quiet rules that keeps reality stable. Break it, and the world starts to wobble.
The Workshop at the Edge of Normality
In a garden workshop he built himself, Wainwright constructs these oversized artefacts using wood, metal and plastic. Each piece takes anywhere from a couple of days to two weeks.
So far, the habit has cost him around £2,500.
Which, in the economy of hobbies, is either trivial or alarming depending on your relationship to time.
Some pieces have been sold locally, passed along through word of mouth like rumours. But this isn’t a business. Not really.
It’s closer to a compulsion.
The Wife, The Wall, The Containment Strategy
His wife, Cat Thompson, offers the kind of pragmatic support that keeps strange projects from tipping into full domestic collapse.
“He keeps them mainly on the garage wall,” she said. “We have a summer room… it’s manageable.”
Manageable is doing a lot of work there.
There’s a quiet negotiation in every household where one person decides to enlarge reality. A boundary between curiosity and clutter. Between art and… a very large plug taking up your living space.
Still, she describes seeing the oversized plug as “complete joy.”
Which raises a question: is the joy in the object itself, or in the fact that someone thought to make it?
Touching the Impossible
When Wainwright has displayed his work publicly, something unexpected happened.
Blind visitors loved it.
They could run their hands over familiar objects made strange by scale—feeling details that are usually too small to notice. The ridges of a plug. The grain of a pencil. The mechanics of a cassette.
In enlarging the ordinary, he had made it newly perceptible.
Not just visible—but tangible in a deeper way.
The Philosophy of Making Things Bigger
There’s a particular kind of restlessness that arrives after usefulness ends.
You’ve spent decades being needed—by a job, a system, a schedule. Then suddenly, nothing requires you. The world shrinks, politely.
Wainwright’s response is simple: make things bigger.
Not metaphorically. Literally.
A quiet rebellion against reduction. Against the idea that later life should contract into something neat and containable.
His creations don’t solve anything. They don’t optimise or streamline. They just… exist. Larger than necessary. Slightly ridiculous. Impossible to ignore.
The Superlarge Pencil
His most popular piece is a five-foot HB pencil. People love it. Which is interesting, because a pencil is perhaps the most unremarkable object imaginable. Cheap. Replaceable. Forgettable.
Until it isn’t.
Until it’s large enough that you have to walk around it. Large enough that it demands attention. Large enough that it stops being a tool and becomes a question:
Why does this exist? And, by extension: Why does anything?
The Smallness We Accept
There’s something faintly accusatory about Wainwright’s work. We accept the scale of things without question. The size of a plug. The length of a pencil. The dimensions of our days. We assume they are fixed.
They aren’t.
They’re just… agreed upon.
And somewhere in Peterborough, in a garden workshop, a man is quietly breaking that agreement—one oversized object at a time. Not to impress. Not to sell. Not even, really, to make a point.
Just to avoid becoming small.