The Good Builder - Researching John Laing
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 the level of interconnectedness I would mention a talk given by Rhys Morgan on The Architecture of Neolithic Orkney: From Representation to Re-Presentation in which he drew the analogy between Magritte's "This is not a Pipe" image (actually titled The Treachery of Images) and the way in which images become the object (my understanding of his words) and for me this linked directly to a quote I was using from Robert Elwall who said 'architectural photographs have been taken for granted, discussed as if they were the buildings themselves rather than portrayals of them at particular moments in time'.
Interesting times and food for thought for my next presentation at the Construction History Society in Aptil.
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 ga
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.
Tony Presland
This blog records my journey to a PhD in Architectural History at the Bartlett School of Architecture at University College, London. This follows on from an M.St in the History of Design at Oxford.