The Sunday Feature is one of the most consistently interesting things on Radio 3

The story is likely apocryphal — and so disgraceful I almost hesitate to tell it — but it goes like this. On the night of 14 November 1940, as more than 500 Luftwaffe rained bombs on the people of Coventry, the newly appointed city architect Donald Gibson was watching the fires.

Gibson had been appointed to the newly created position of ‘city architect’ three years earlier by the radical Labour council that had come to power in a local election. His job was to modernise what was then Britain’s best-preserved medieval city, and build the ideals of social justice and equality into the city’s brick and mortar.

That night, as swathes of the old city fell, Gibson was supposedly hurrying back and forth between the window and his architectural models to see which parts of his plan he could now put into place, the last logistical obstacles having been blown to convenient smithereens.