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 about¹. 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 that the original tower remained intact (and can still be climbed today) provided a great opportunity for photographers to take oblique images which give a real sense of the shape of the building in a way that is maybe no longer quite so apparent in its completed state.

Coventry Cathedral. View from tower of the Old Cathedral, showing the west wall

August 6th, 1958 © Historic England 2018 - The John Laing Collection No. 53037

^1. Barry, R. (1997). The Good Builder: The John Laing Story, London: James & James. p130-133

Comments

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.

PHRC 2019

The PHRC conference at De Montfort was tremendous and provided a lot of insights for me to go away and think about. In particular there was a lot of discussion about what is missing from an archive and what that tells us - sometimes as much as the extant material. Things for me to think about include: How colour photography creates a new sensory experience - maybe tying this into the work that Lynda Nead has done Who are the keepers of corporate memory - the business or the people who work in it? How posed are the images - are they pictures of work in progress or staged Do the images sanction and "testify" to a particular (curated?) history I was also pointed at other work that I need to read - the pile keeps getting higher!

The Construction History Society - 6th Annual Conference

James W P Campbell opening the Conference On 5th April I got to present my early research at the Sixth Annual Conference of the Construction History Society at Queens' College, Cambridge. I was very pleased with the reaction and got a lot of questions and comments following the talk and have a number of angles to follow up. In particular my characterisation of senior staff in suits and labourers in more humble outfits was challenged with one member of the audience suggesting that suits were almost ubiquitous wear for all classes - something to look into. Other areas of interest included potential use of progress photos as means of protecting the company from claims by subcontractors or clients when a job took longer or cost more and there was a general sense that research into the social aspects of construction history as demonstrated by some of the Laing photographs would be important. The paper is published in the Proceedings so I am hopeful that the resear...

The Good Builder - Researching John Laing

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