The Good Builder - Researching John Laing

Back when I was working for Reuters they came up with a great tag line for their news service - "The Truth - Deal with It" linking the idea of Reuters as an impartial news source and its ability to deliver that news quickly to trading desktops thus offering advantages to traders making decisions about whether to buy or sell. The difficult question, especially in our "post truth" world is how can we be objective and in the rather different field of my PhD research I have been promoted to think about the John Laing archive in terms of how objective is the story that it tells of the company and its accomplishments and whether the process of managing the archive itself alters the meaning. Rebecca Peabody's article What Is the Future of the Photo Archive?  started this line of thinking and  led onto looking at the Photo Archives series of symposia and in particular  Photo Archives V: The Paradigm of Objectivity . I probably need to start to think more about the

At this very early stage in my reading I am starting to try and sort out some of the mechanics of note keeping, what do I need to read first, how to remember to go back to something I saw in passing and so on. At the moment its all a bit scattergun but a few things seem to come regularly to the fore and may end up being areas for more investigation: Concrete and Prefabs - John Laing did a lot of development work on concrete and how it could be used as part of house building systems (which might be considered prefabs depending on your definition of that term) - this led to commercial products such as Lytag. Concrete has a vast history but seems to have been reborn in the post WWII period - Jones suggests that 'As the modern world rose from the rubble of Second World War, it was shaped by one material above all others.' 1 and that material was concrete. Coventry Cathedral - This might provide a focus based on the design work, the documentation of the building and of course t