Figurations and Offer

I attended the Figurations Conference at the Bartlett on 25th April. The range of discussion was very wide and quite esoteric. One presentation which I found particularly useful was Carlo Menon's discussion of "minor to major". For me this offered up the idea that while much of John Laing's photographic imagery might be considered "minor" in that they show vernacular housing, construction workers going about their jobs and so on , in reality this work should be considered "major" because of the aggregated impact that it created over time. Some of the work, such as Coventry Cathedral and the M1 falls immediately into the "major" but I think a lot of other material is just as important in the story that it tells.

The 4th of May has been a red letter day for me, firstly I got to meet the people at John Laing and its Charitable Trust in person and had a really great conversation and then when I got home and checked I had my formal offer letter from the Bartlett - its all very real now!

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SAHGB - First Public Outing for the John Laing Research

Yesterday I presented 'The Power and the Glory: A Study of John Laing & Son Ltd through its Photographic Archive" at the Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain's Architectural History Workshop in London. There was a lot of positive feedback and a number of entirely new areas to take a look at, such as the work done by William Mitchell. Mitchell was a sculptor from the 1950s who worked extensively in Laing's concrete products - thanks to Dr. Dawn Pereira (see some of Dawn's work on Mitchell here The concrete legacy of William Mitchell ) for bringing this to my attention. Mitchell has a number of works listed including pieces in Clifton Cathedral ( Cathedral Church of SS Peter and Paul, Clifton Park ). The series of presentations helped give a real sense of the amazing variety of subjects and approaches that fall loosely under the banner of architectural history and it was noticeable that photography played a part in quite a few. To show th

Going Nuclear

One of the many novel engineering feats John Laing was involved in was the birth of commercial nuclear power in Britain. The company worked on the Windscale reactors and were part of the AEI consortium that built Berkeley Power Station, the first commercial power station. The John Laing Collection has a series of fascinating images showing how very low tech the initial construction phase was and the human side of work - from tea wagons to the local postman taking an interest. Nuclear Power Station, Berkeley, First day of arrivals to the site, 8th Jan 1957 © Historic England 2018 - The John Laing Collection No. 48773 Nuclear Power Station, Berkeley, Supplies being delivered to caravan in its temporary site, 8th Jan 1957 © Historic England 2018 - The John Laing Collection No. 48781 Nuclear Power Station, Berkeley, Local postman interested in heavy machines, 8th Jan 1957 © Historic England 2018 - The John Laing Collection No. 48778 Nuclear Power Station, Berkel

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.

The Good Builder - Researching John Laing

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