LMS Route: Nuneaton to Coventry

Foleshill Station: lnwrf2071

Looking towards Nuneaton from the Coventry end of Foleshill station's up platform with the 1931 erected footbridge in the foreground. The station buildings on both platform's were supplemented by the addition of two long corrugated waiting shelters which were provided to accommodate the very large numbers of factory workers using the station following the expansion of many different industries. In 1905-6 there were some seven tool manufacturers in the city including Webster and Bennett, White and Poppe, and Alfred Herbert which grew in 1936 to eleven and by 1950 a total of twenty-one. By 1910 Herbert's employed 1,500 men, and in 1927 some 2,500 when the firm was specialising in capstan lathes, turret lathes, automatic screw machines, and ball-bearing drilling machines. Herbert's had two large factories, one at the Butts in the centre of the city and the other at nearby Edgwick. In 1928 the whole organization was transferred to Edgwick, and in 1945 the former premises of the Rover Company in Red Lane were additionally acquired. By 1963 the firm claimed to be the world's largest machine-tool organization with four production factories in and about Coventry and five subsidiary companies in Great Britain. In Coventry it employed some 5,000 workers.

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