The Truth - Deal with It

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 process by which the archive has been created and the changes that have been made to it as it has developed and been passed from John Laing to Historic England (and are there any intermediate stops).

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The Mystery L

Clapham Wind Tunnel One area where being able to talk to the people who worked for John Laing is really helpful is unravelling the odd mystery. I have noticed that in a number of photographs from the 1950s there is one or two individuals who had a large L on their jacket. I speculated on what this might be and thought that most likely it was to designate the leader of a team of workers. I was able to put a short piece in John Laing's Retired Employees' News asking for any information on the mystery L and several people kindly wrote to explain the mystery - which was no real mystery at all. The L simply stood for Laing but only new employees would be given a jacket with the logotype and so this took a long time to permeate through the organisation. A case of applying Occam's razor and not overthinking things for me.

PhD Introductions

So 2 months into the degree it is time to talk about my research ideas to a wider audience. On 4th Dec the School will be running a session titled PhD Introductions. The purpose of the event is to introduce the students' previous work and research interests, to discuss their current research ideas, developments and experiments and to generate a lively discussion about research in architecture. I get to do a 10 minute presentation followed by comments/questions/discussion. It has been a useful exercise so far - thinking about how to condense a somewhat sprawling thought process into a short piece and to make sure that it is accessible in the sense of providing enough of the background and context to allow the audience to make some sense of everything.

The Building of Coventry Cathedral

The building of Coventry Cathedral after the previous incarnation was all but destroyed in a German air raid was one of the "power and glory" contracts that John Laing won in 1956 and one that John Laing felt particularly strongly about 1 . The John Laing Collection has a number of albums which depict the development from many angles and includes both construction work and more presentational aspects such as the recording of visiting dignitaries and in particular members of the Royal Family. The images for the latter are often taken from newspapers such as the Coventry Evening Telegraph. One such image from the Leicester Evening Mail shows Sir Basil Spence showing Queen Elizabeth II a model of the new Cathedral in the grounds (it is assumed) of the ruins of the old Cathedral. Basil Spence explaining the site of the new Cathedral to Her Majesty The Queen Photograph by Leicester Evening Mail 23rd March, 1956. © Historic England 2018 - The John Laing Collection The fact...

The Good Builder - Researching John Laing

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