People Gallery

Victoria Park Estate JLP01_08_078248

Victoria Park Estate, Macclesfield, Cheshire East. Three girls standing beside a stone wall, looking towards flats in the distance at the Victoria Park development, built using the 12M Jespersen system.
In 1963, John Laing and Son Ltd bought the rights to the Danish industrialised building system for flats known as Jespersen (sometimes referred to as Jesperson). The company built factories in Scotland, Hampshire and Lancashire producing Jespersen prefabricated parts and precast concrete panels, allowing the building of housing to be rationalised, saving time and money. The Victoria Park development in Macclesfield, lying between the park and the centre of town, was built by Laing in two phases using the 12M Jespersen system. Providing around 500 flats, the design consisted of thirteen interlinked blocks forming a series of courts with landscaped gardens. The first phase was completed in 1968 with the second phase started in the same year. This photograph was published in June 1968 in Laing's monthly newsletter Team Spirit'

© Historic England Archive

Map Room JLP01_08_077525

University of Nottingham, Sir Clive Grainger Building, University Park, Nottingham. The map room in a new building for the Faculty of Law and Social Sciences at the University of Nottingham, with a man looking into a drawer in a plans chest.
This university building was designed by the architects Bartlett and Gray of Nottingham and was built by the Nottingham district team of Laing's Construction Company for the University of Nottingham, with work starting in the autumn of 1965. In an article published in February 1968 in their monthly newsletter Team Spirit, Laing describe the building as consisting of five buildings in one grouped round a courtyard with a lecture theatre off at a tangent. Originally housing the departments of geography, social science, politics, law and banking, it has subsequently been renamed the Sir Clive Grainger Building and now houses the School of Geography and the School of Economics

© Historic England Archive

Replacement housing JLP01_08_069312

St Mary's Estate, Oldham. A worker securing a concrete slab during the construction of 12M Jespersen prototype flats in Oldham, with derelict terraced houses in the background.
In 1963, John Laing and Son Ltd bought the rights to the Danish industrialised building system known as Jespersen (sometimes referred to as Jesperson). The company built factories in Scotland, Hampshire and Lancashire producing Jespersen prefabricated parts and precast concrete panels, allowing the building of housing to be rationalised, saving time and money. The prototype flats shown in the photograph were built using the 12M Jespersen building system and were the first to be erected in Britain by Laing for the County Borough of Oldham. They were a short distance from the future St Mary's Estate on which 500 dwellings were due to be built comprising of low rise flats and modern terraced houses, replacing the earlier slums which had occupied the area. The 12M Jespersen flats on the housing estate were later demolished in 2007 with only the houses left standing

© Historic England Archive