This contains two firsts for me: the first focus on a piece of west country modernism that has been repurposed, and the first to have been suggested by a reader.

Nailsea sits on the Nailsea coal basin, within the North Somerset Levels. It was the coal seam that the village was exploiting by the 1600s, with scores of pits. That drew glass manufacturers in the late 1700s, reducing their transport costs for cheap glass by being close to the coal for their furnaces. But by the end of the 1800s, both the glassworks and the mining were gone.

What was left was an 1841 railway station, around twenty minutes’ walk away at Backwell, and transport links to the port of Bristol. Walking up from the station, I passed comfortable Victorian villas, then some interwar houses and a 1950s estate. And then, suddenly, a 1970s town centre appeared, parked on and by the old village High Street. And at its heart was a spaceship.

This is the story of Somerset’s town planners, and the ambitious architect leading the county council into the 1960s. It’s also the story of a building that has been repurposed: a building made to tell stories.