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 research will gain wider interest as members of the Society who were not able to attend read the work.

The Conference Proceedings

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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 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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