Post-war redevelopment

Kaga, no I don't think you're being rude at all. However, I still tend to think Jessica is exploring how people feel about Coventry in light of the bombings? I cannot say this definitively as I have not had any contact with the young lady, but it would seem that Helen interpreted it in a similar way? Your own continuing interest in Coventry, despite you now living on the South Coast, is a perfect example of how someone can feel an attachment, almost a belonging, to a place. Clearly I could have no personal experience of the blitz, but I can empathise with the loss of life and architecture. I, like Helen, can walk through the city centre and still see the scars from that time but, you are right, I can only imagine what it would have been like to experience the terror and suffering... so it's a good job that I didn't claim I could have.

Jessica wrote "To what extent does the past WWII bombing of Coventry continue to affect sense of place and place attachment?" It doesn't exclude those who lived through it or those born afterwards or even brief inhabitants like me. Even today the event colours people's thoughts about the city. It affects what was built after the war and what is or isn't being preserved. But it's useful for you to point out the possible ambiguity. Your tale of those who became the £10 Poms is very relevant but not the only story to be told. Some are serious, some are trivial but they are part of the bigger picture.

This is a fascinating topic! I have messaged Rob to initiate contact with Jessica. Whether or not she allows me to participate, I am enjoying thinking about the subject in more depth than I ever have before.

Good morning all, This subject I could not let go by, maybe I am more emotional or whatever you call it, but as Jessica mentioned attachment - At the time of Dunkirk, the Home Guard were formed, two middle aged men, who knew each other by sight from twenty years before, met again when they volunteered for LDV. They found that they had both registered the same month in Coventry's Drill Hall in 1917, and now we're seeing their children register in that same building, had the same feelings and attachment that went very deep inside them. They had served on the same front lines on the Western Front, they recalled slit trenches that were named Gasworks Alley, Smithford Alley, and a number of Coventry places, as well as the same bombardments etc. They both lived in Foleshill, they worked side by side in rescue during the air-raids, including the hospital in Foleshill Road. They remembered the meetings after the war, about the Council House and the Memorial Park etc. One was my father, the other was my foreman when I left school and went to work in 1941, there were thousands of men in Coventry that felt that strong attachment to the city. My own opinion was that two world wars, a number of strikes in between, created a sense of attachment that would never happen again.

In 1939, Coventry was still mainly Victorian, the old weavers' houses, ancient buildings and market stalls still existed, but war was looming. We still had our city, but no idea what the future held as people went off to war. But fifteen years later, nothing was rebuilt in a better way, not the cathedral nor the market place, not the market tower nor the street of broadgate or a dozen streets we had known. What we got was an American style city of precincts, drab buildings, a foolish, childish clock and bridge, that took Hertford Street away from the centre, a building that spread across Broadgate chopping it in half, rooftop car parks etc that weren't liked or wanted for the people used to the old city. But they did not build new factories for over another decade, so we had Dunlop, Armstrong Siddeley, Sterling Metals, etc still polluting the air. So the people that had fought the war, seen abroad, thought, if this is the way it's going to be, then why not change the whole environment for £10 (two weeks' wages) and the whole family could start anew in a better climate and lots of room, so they left in their hundreds. What you people have is the new city, to your ways and wants, and I believe that's changing from your own schooldays.

I think that it's hard to know how much of the emotional changes to Coventry people were due to the War and how much was already ongoing before but I can imagine that the two were conflated into one big hurt. Almost every street in the centre I can think of had already been heavily stripped of old buildings, many of them removed post 1900. While it seemed like Hitler targeted the city indiscriminately, many of the destroyed sections of old buildings were adjacent to relatively new factories or large non industrial buildings. Even areas that retained old street fronts were backed by zigzag factory roofs and others were overshadowed by massive (by their era) multi storey blocks. Gosford Street was dominated by the two factories on the south side. The Spon Street Crow Lane area had similar factories. Most of the north side of West Orchard to Well Street had big buildings including the Chapel. Little Park Street had Swift to the southwest and Bushill's in the middle west side. To the east, towards Much Park Street there were many zigzag sheds and the big brewery buildings. There were factory sheds from Priory Street to the east end of New Buildings. While Broadgate, Cross Cheaping and Smithford Street were mostly shopping areas, they had seen large complexes built - Owen,Owens, City Arcade etc. These weren't part of the old city but they represented 20th century renewal. The adults would have been hurt twice, losing their cherished ancient shops for some ugly new complex and then to lose those, just as they were becoming familiar. I don't know how much objection there was to the late 19th and early 20th century demolitions but I know that both Dr Troughton and Sidney Bunney were prompted to start capturing the city on paper vecause they could see it vanishing. Troughton stuck mostly to medieval buildings and Bunney followed up by capturing the Georgian changes. He overlapped the photographers who documented many of the sights. It's worth viewing the aerial shots on Britain From Above which start at 1919 to see how industrialised the city was before the War. Those who came after saw ravaged swathes of the city and compared them to picture post card views of a city that were already out of date before the War. Of course, ugly as they were, the factories represented work and prosperity, so their destruction hurt in a different way to losing homes and shops. To me Coventry has had an unhealthy relationship with the War. While the deaths were terrible, peace is a wonderful thing and Coventry has a right to remind people of the horrors of war, it's not a platform to build hope on. I think it contributed to the city's problems after the war more than the actual damage. It created something of a 'oh it's damaged now, why bother?' mentality with the remaining parts of the city. I think it explains why so much of what remained was demolished. I agree with Kaga that the decision to not rebuild the cathedral was a significant event and ties in with the drive for new builds rather than treasuring survivors of the bombing. Alternatively the mood to destroy the past might be encoded in the planning department and was so, long before Hitler came along. While I'm not especially sentimental and know that we can't trap places in the past, we have also thrown a lot of treasures out to be replaced with ugliness and 'progress'. Too often modern architecture is designed in isolation and isn't a compliment to its neighbours. Often the discordance is planned to show off how different the architect is. Post War Coventry was especially bad at creating a pleasing whole but I am seeing signs that it is learning. I think I'm seeing signs that the City is starting to love itself again... and then they knock down the Cross and I'm not so sure.

No, Helen. What Coventry did in 1936-39, they built Trinity Street, full of shops exactly the same as Broadgate shops, with parking outside, not on top of shops where older people could not navigate. The same with the Precinct, people had to walk down the Precinct then back up the Precinct, to get transport, and the great big wall of Broadgate House was ugly, like a prison wall, and served no purpose. By planning a shopping centre away from the transport the older you got the more of a nightmare it became. No, the only thing the architect wanted was to be first in everything new, at the expense of the people, and that was the complaint of most people I heard. The beauty of old Coventry was the closeness of being in the city, the smell of new bread, pies, linoleum. In a hundred yards you could buy a jam tart or a tractor, or an ancient history book, or any coloured shoelaces. Now you have to walk miles to get a shoelace, if you're lucky. OK, so I'm a grumpy old man, and past my sell by date. Jump on a tram outside the shop. How I wish!

Hi Kaga, what you describe wasn't all as a result of the war, although it would have speeded things up considerably. Coventry High Street with its large banks was a forerunner of our modern trend for bigger single premises. The market hall wiped out many small shops and houses along West Orchard in addition to the original market. Corporation Street was built to a much bigger scale than the old streets and wiped out many buildings on Bishop Street, Well Street, West Orchard and Fleet Street. The first Owen Owen was comparable to post-war construction. The theatres/cinemas got bigger. The post-war construction of the polytechnic/university wiped away many of the surviving buildings from the war but wasn't directly connected to the destruction. The issues with transport have developed due to car ownership and personal choice as much as town planning. Pedestrianizing town centres was to try and make the experience of shopping better although I agree that it hasn't worked exactly to plan. Supermarkets have replaced the streets where new bread, pies, jam tarts or coloured shoelaces can be found within a 100 yards, although tractors, lino and history books are a rarity in most outlets. Even more radical, we can now order all those things to our door, which is contributing to the death of the high street that supermarkets started. The efforts to save town centres is based around bringing people back in to live there, the exodus having started well before the war. Scooters and driverless taxis are an attempt to deal with the walking distances - with unintended consequences. This is what I mean about it being difficult to separate modernisation from the impact of the bombing.

Helen, Yes, that's my point. High Street had been changed before the war, but in keeping with Coventry, and so was the Council House, which still had a medieval outside look, but modern inside. Had the rest of Coventry followed in that trait, would have been ideal, a city to visit, a city of two cultures that blended in with each other. They did it with WWI, why not WWII?

Morning, Kaga. The High Street was in keeping with the era it was rebuilt in but it wasn't in keeping with the bulk of the city. By your time it felt normal because you'd never seen it any other way. In the late 1700s the city street fronts were almost untouched medieval structures, with only a few true Georgian structures. A lot of it was only 2 storey and had limited room for improvement without demolition and rebuilding. The courts were an attempt to house more people and businesses but were horrible. On the main streets the Victorians harked back to early styles including medieval and Roman but with no plan to stick to one or the other. The early 1900s saw the emergence of Art Deco, which was the forerunner of the brick or concrete boxes that dominated for a while. Minimal styling and maximum space was the trend. It was fashion and commerce that determined what was rebuilt plus that style was also cheaper than traditional methods. Money was very tight after the War. Modern doesn't have to echo the past to look good along side it, but it has to compliment it. Coventry is not the only area where there is no overarching style to bring the whole together. In the UK it's the norm to stick stuff side by side that create a discordant appearance. The prettiest places are those with limited colour palettes, styles and materials. I think we are sometimes fooled into how good the past looked because black and white photography rendered everything into 1 colour palette. While a shortage of money and large plots to fill were part of Coventry's misfortune, there was something self destructive going on. I just can decide if it started pre War and/or afflicted the whole country. My own lane has houses of many eras and frankly looks a bit ugly because of it.

I posted this one a while ago on one of the Mystery Pics threads - We pretty much managed to work out its location but this new one to me, thanks to Coventry Digital, helps us confirm with the view down what was to become Market Way. I think that's the same building to the right looking the other way.

Neil, it was discussed on the Coventry Digital thread

An interesting angle of the work to replace Smithford Street with the Precinct.