Modern

A good chunk of my photographic outings this summer has been spent being abused as a terrorist suspect by staff at a variety of intriguing late-1950s and early-1960s railway stations built by the Eastern Region of British Railways. This weekend gave me the chance to explore a couple of similar vintage on the old London Midland Region.

Stafford is not everyone's cup of tea. It's a late flowering of the genre, the smooth finish replaced with rough cast concrete in a nod to the impending Brutalist era.

But the focus on the passenger, on bringing light and an airy feel into the station, was the same -- here the giant plate glass windows of the waiting room overlook the platforms below.

There's the same asymmetric composition provided by the sharp verticals of the lift towers (provided to service the parcels business, but brilliantly useful today to provide easy access for passengers).

At Stafford I'm not wild about some of the detailing -- those parallel red-painted wooden balcony panels do nothing for me -- and the effect is rather heavy for my taste, but there is no doubting the audacity of the concept.

The flying roof at the front of the building signposts the entrance and provides a broad welcome for all, even on an overcast late Autumn day.

Not too far away lurks Coventry, largely destroyed by Nazi bombing, and thus a centre for all sorts of interesting architectural experiments of the 1950s and 60s. The cathedral is the most famous of these, followed closely by the railway station.

In fact this was rather hurriedly built to ensure it was ready for the arrival of the Queen by train on her way to open the Cathedral. It used the basic spatial planning devised at Banbury (the first of the post-War "modern" stations), honed by experiences on the Eastern Region at Harlow.

The same long, low horizontals that we saw at Harlow Town are here stretched even further -- this was meant to be a station fit for a Queen and, for years, was BR's flagship modern station.

The thing about Coventry is that it's all about the light -- huge plate glass windows (sadly uncleaned) were intended to let sunlight pour into the modern, efficient station, services provided by gleaming and (above all) clean electrified trains.

The contrast with the grubby old age of steam and soot was emphasised. How ironic that, today, it should be allowed to get so dirty.

Even so, there is an architectural purposefulness that the Coventry dirt can't conceal.

Which, alas, is more than can be said for Northampton. This also suffers from uncleaned windows (what is it with Network Rail's inability to clean windows?), but the view of the main station from the footbridge window is depressing for more than just the dirt.

This is such a wasted opportunity: a brand-new station had to be built, so why do it in this depressing style that speaks more of provincial garden centre than of vital centre for communication.

The best thing about it is easily the BR double-arrow symbol, which looks good on pretty much anything.

Including, it has to be said, on the newly-restored facade at Liverpool Lime Street, now giving us one of the best railway facades of anywhere in Britain -- the station with which we'll finish this round-up.

This being Liverpool, there is also the typical scene outside the station where a group of shifty-looking youths are being interrogated by a gang of rozzers:

But riding high above it all is that marvellous, timeless symbol:

Liverpool Lime Street may hark back to an earlier age of great station-building, but some of the best principles of then have been easily incorporated into the dreams of the 1950s.