Post-war redevelopment

Hi Rob & thank you. What a wealth of detail & info.

Fascinating images of the redevelopment. Or should that be vandalism? Heaven knows how awful it would have been if they had connected the ringroad to car parks with flyovers! Interesting to see how they see places like White Street as being 'problems' and replaced it with a concrete structure that looks ghastly and has some dubious side effects.

Thank you LdeMain and Rob for the photos, they gave a good insight to where we were and where we are now.

Thank you for your hard work on the Gallery, Rob, most interesting and highly informative. Thanks also to LdeMain for her input, those pictures were great

I found this photograph of the work in progress but would like to know more about the location. Re-building Coventry

Sorry, InnisRoad, but Green's camera shop was not housed in the Woolworths building. It was in a self-contained unit in Shelton Square.

Greens was in the row of shops between the late-lamented Market Tavern and Shelton Square

An outdoor market scene but I don't know the location. Outdoor Market, 1948

It looks like the old market behind the Leofric, with the fire station in the distance

The buildings on the left are in Cross Cheaping and the tent on the right is where the new Owen Owen store is about to be built. Yes, West Orchard/Market Place

Unfortunately, the 'myth' of Coventry is that the blitz destroyed it. I believe the council destroyed much more than the Luftwaffe, including the street plan, which had developed organically over the years and was ruined when they built the precinct and ring road. Even with the war damage, it could have been restored and made into an elegant city with plenty of old streets. Instead they destroyed it all and now we have a city that's listed in books of 'crap towns' and described in travel guides as somewhere that it's best to avoid - if it's mentioned.

You are quite right Annewiggy, I admit I didn't really explore the collections site once it was apparent there were no images online. I can only agree with you and Flapdoodle about Coventry. The plans for a completely new city centre were in place long before the Luftwaffe assisted with the demolition.The existence of these plans meant that the rebuilding of Coventry would never follow the pattern of cities such as Nuremberg or Warsaw after WWII or Arras after WWI which, in the main, sought to recreate the places that their inhabitants had long cherished. Since I left Coventry, nearly 40 years ago, it would appear that planners and council are unrepentant of the damage that their predecessors inflicted on the city and seem determined to hide the fact that there was once so much beauty within the Ring Road. Many buildings that could, and should, have been restored have been torn down to be replaced by the sort of bland architecture that blights most retail parks. It has been a few years since I was in the centre, but from my last visit and from Google I am shocked at how much retail space has disappeared within the Ring Road. The nearest town to where I live now is Tunbridge Wells, which has a fraction of the population of Coventry. It would not surprise me if there are as many shops in Tunbridge Wells as there are in the centre of Coventry and there is certainly more variety.

It is to be regretted that whatever thread we follow we inevitably stumble across the denigration of Donald Gibson. Could I perhaps suggest that Doodleflap is given his own personal thread on which to continually reiterate his views on this subject. I thought the very thing that binds the Forum together is a love of the City, its ancient history and its post-war history. I would not suggest for one minute that this love should be blind or that we should not point out the mistakes when and where we see them. However we are fortunate [those of us that are of a certain age!] that we have seen as big a change in a City as any in the country and that our contributions to the Forum chart those changes from a time when the last vestiges of pre-war Coventry gradually disappeared. Our difficulty is to balance that wonderful sense of nostalgia with an objective view of the development of the City, a City that was one of only four in the country to have designated Areas of Extensive War Damage [City Centre, Hillfields and Spon End] and the special powers that went with them. But it was also a City that had nearly doubled in population between 1930 and 1960 with a centre that would have been totally unsuitable to cope with the demands on it and the vehicles using it without radical redevelopment. To a great extent it is academic whether the Ford approach or the Gibson approach was the right one prior to the Blitz because after the many bombing raids a comprehensive route became the only option. I am sure we can all come up with a list of buildings that could have been retained and incorporated into the City Centre and no doubt today the approach even to comprehensive redevelopment would be slightly different. However we should not be blind to the state of the City Centre, it was devastated and ramshackled, most buildings had suffered some damage and there were mixtures of residential properties and often noisy, dirty factories working out of dilapidated premises. To suggest that this was a basis for wholesale retention is ludicrous. We should also not forget that even if the City Centre had been put back largely as it was before then it would certainly not be like that today. Market forces largely dictate the size and shape of City Centres today. Birmingham is now on its second new Bull Ring and I am sure that the whole of Coventry's shopping would be locked up inside a giant mall. Coventry may have suffered from being first and maybe the uses within it are too compartmentalised: this means that as shopping suffers the Centre of the City also suffers.

My affection for Coventry stems from the fact that I spent my formative years there and I am trying to understand what happened to the city I grew up in. Many European cities had to cope with growing populations and the advent of the motor car in the 20th century, yet most managed to preserve much of the heritage they were entrusted with. I am thinking of the many medieval Italian cities (and not just Florence or Venice), Rouen and Avignon in France and German cities such as Dusseldorf and Cologne all managed to retain much of their historic past. German cities, in general, suffered much more damage than Coventry but, thanks to effective lobbying by their citizens who wanted to preserve their old towns, planners were forced to rethink their grandiose schemes. Is it not surprising that Gibson is denigrated; he considered the city, of that time, to be barbarous and undemocratic and that only the modern architect could provide living spaces that were rational and ordered. It is Coventry's tragedy that they employed, at that time, an architect whose guiding principles seem to have been Socialist realism rather than aesthetics.

Mick, I have never said there was no requirement for new routes, that's a straw man argument. There is always needs for new routes in cities when they grow, and in Coventry itself we have examples of this with Hertford Street (Laid out to relieve a small lane) and Corporation Street (To remove traffic from the congested Smithford Street route). Both these routes were fitted into the existing urban network and more than likely created new opportunities for business. The ring road has altered the way people use the city. Cities are about flow of people, and in Coventry people just flow around it on a dual carriageway, as I do twice a day. Buildings get built as a consequence of the flow of people, hence we have cheap looking sheds around the ring road or just nothing but empty land (Some of which has been empty for decades - and it will always be empty as it's going to be hard to develop.) And plenty of areas in the city centre that have slowly become empty (Look at what has happened to the area between the ring road and precinct?) Whereas other cities have streets of businesses, we have dead streets lined with empty frontages. Our main city centre 'route' is lined with nothing. There was no reason why it had to end up being like this - being a pioneer is sometimes not great. By the time Coventry was being 'finished off' things had changed and no one went down this route again.