Skip to content ⤶

Photographic Gallery

The John Laing photographic collection, held by Historic England, contains 238,000 images dating back to the 1890s. John Laing was a company that profoundly shaped post war Britain, with 10,000 digitised images from this period showcased in the Breaking New Ground collection.

We have published just a few of these images below. Click on a thumbnail image to view the larger photograph and caption.

1962 Sir John Laing outside the completed Coventry Cathedral. He refused to accept any profit for the project and this was one of the biggest projects of the day. At the same time, the Company was building the world’s first full scale nuclear Power Station at Berkeley. The two projects were referred to in the press at the time as: The Power and the Glory.

1947 A group of men supervising children on a merry-go-round ride during a Laing staff outing to Whitley

1953 Coronation year train chartered for a Laing staff outing to celebrate.

1964: Bull Ring first bus applauded as leaving terminal

1974/75 Graythorp at dusk where the Company built the first oil rig jackets as the North Sea oil fields opened for the first time. Colour shot taken at dusk.

1959 M1: Ground works on one of the sites along the four first stretches being built by John Laing. It was the dawn of the motorway era, although a small section of multi carriageway road had been previously built as part of the Preston bypass.

M1 1959 aerial picture looking SE towardsA50 near Moulsoe

1982 Birmingham Airport concreting of new apron

Moment Ernest Marples opened the M1 at Dunstable

Sir John Laing visits Easiform homes at Patchway in Bristol

Sir John with camera

Ideal Homes exhibition

Filton snow drift

Yehudi-Menuhin admiring Elisabeth Frink sculture at the Paternoster having just unveiled it 1975.

Sir Kirby Laing speaks to nursing sisters during topping out at St Thomas

Celebrities in digger bucket.

Pipelining in Cumbria, early 1970s.

HM Queen Elizabeth II opening the Chelsea and Westminster Hospital in 1993.

John Laing Collection: Breaking New Ground

View the collection via the Historic England website.

View the collection