A Ladybird Mystery

The hidden secrets of a curious poster

A few years ago when I was in Glasgow my friends Rose Ruane and Jack Kibble-White gave me a brown envelope. ‘We have a stack of these,’ said Rose. ‘Do you know what it is?’ I pulled out the contents and there was a poster, printed on a rough newsprint kind of stock, not a high end glossy print but some sort of functional, mass produced item. I could see straight away why they’d thought of me. The image showed a surveyor standing on a vast building site, tower block over in one corner, half-assembled slab block in the background, concrete panels being craned in. And the image, well it was pure Ladybird books, rendered in the busy, romantic and curiously flat style of the ‘People at Work’ series. ‘Do you know anything about it?’ they asked expectantly. I stared hard at the print, but no, there was nothing here that immediately told me why this had been produced, whether this was a real place, or who’d illustrated it. I felt as if I’d let them down, surely I was going to be the perfect person to ask, with my fetish for both old Ladybird non-fiction books and modernist architecture. If I didn’t know, then who would?