Coventry station, 29th October

Made from a standardised aluminium walling system, with glass, timber and brick infill panels, the station has a prosaic feel to it.  Internal and external spaces are bare and simple and the materials are hardly extravagant.  It doesn't feel either like an airport nor a living room.  The usual accretions of ad-hoc signage, CCTV, advertising and general shouty branding don't manage to smother the straightforward dignity of the platforms.   The trick to this building is not the materials themselves, but the way they are applied.  Each and every utilitarian element is aligned in a clean and simple way making it feel legible and appropriate.  At the same time, its not that noticeable, like most good design.

Completed in 1962, it certainly doesn't feel 50 years old, though it does have a '50s feel to it.  Coventry of course being much maligned contains both the best and the worst of our strained relationship with , Modernism, but for me, this building simply feels more accommodating and humane than the postmodern, , westfield-cum-airport-itecture of the new St. Pancras and King's Cross stations in London.  Coventry station is Grade II listed, thereby resisting the seemingly attention-deficit process of rebranding that is the most noticeable aspect of our dis-integrated railway system.

The brass plaque contains a poem by Coventrian Philip Larkin:

I Remember, I Remember

Coming up England by a different line

for once, early in the cold new year,

we stopped, and, watching men with number-plates

sprint down the platform to familiar gates,

'Why, Coventry!' I exclaimed.  'I was born here'.

The poem fits well with the architecture of the station as with Coventry itself, speaking of a time when our relationship with manufacture, buildings, places and making was surely different than today.