Method
The reading list behind Floorplate
A few years into this notebook, chasing the exact date a licence was granted, we learned the difference between a source that says something happened and one that makes it true. A newspaper from the week Wrest Point opened, on 10 February 1973, tells you what the ribbon-cutting looked like. The state's own gaming file tells you what the licence said. Floorplate tries never to mistake the first for the second.
What we actually read
State heritage registers and listings
The statutory citation for the building itself: construction date, architect of record, the criteria it was listed under. Settles what was built and when — not who held the gaming licence inside it.
Digitised newspaper archives
Contemporary reporting, searchable by date and place name — good for eyewitness detail no government file records, like the size of an opening-night crowd. Every masthead carried its own leaning, so a claim waits for a second paper before it's treated as settled.
State gaming-authority annual reports and licensing records
The primary record of who held a licence, when it was granted, and on what conditions. Slow to obtain, rarely written as a story, but the one source that outranks a company's own account of itself.
Architecture and heritage-conservation journals
Description of a building's fabric — structural system, materials, later alterations — reviewed by people whose job is getting that right. Good for how a tower was built, not for how well the business inside it traded.
Company histories and prospectuses
Written by the operator, for its shareholders. Reliable for a date, a name, a figure it would not risk stating wrongly on the public record — not for how good the place actually was.
The order we work to
Not every source proves the same thing, so Floorplate reads them in a fixed order rather than blending them into one confident paragraph.
- First: heritage listings, gaming-authority filings, planning approvals.
- Second: contemporary newspaper reporting, checked against a second masthead.
- Last: company brochures and retrospectives, for dates and names only.
How to check a claim
- Search the relevant state heritage register by the building's name — most are public, no request needed.
- Search a newspaper archive by date rather than keyword; a report from opening week rarely uses the words we'd search for now.
- Write to the state gaming authority for licensing history — a request, not a database, and slow.
What this notebook leaves out
No unlinked statistics. No anonymous forum claims. No uncredited listicles repeating a number nobody can trace to a register or a report. If a record can't be put behind a claim, the claim is dropped, or stated plainly as general knowledge.