Inner Ring Road

Agreed - I know loads of non Covents who hate using it and do many 'laps' before finding their exits! Has to be said though - the more I examine old images of the pre-ring road - the more it appears facilitating land to provide for the route seems to have inflicted as much damage as any blitz.

Driving in any city is difficult when one is presented with signs to suburbs and one has no idea where the 'names' are in relation to one another or to any point on the compass. Half of the fun of the Coventry RR has been the junctions and the fact that one needs to be a good 'synchro' driver to get the best out of them.

Driving anywhere unfamiliar is difficult (uncertainy of where you're going, which lanes are required (my personal pet hate)), more so in built up areas because of the extra traffic. Sat navs have been a godsend to help this problem though, especially recent ones which also have the required lane highlighted. I don't feel bothered using the ring road due to my familiarity with it, but wouldn't dream of driving around London - it just seems so stressful. Yet someone I know does all the time and they say they haven't found a more confusing or horrible road to navigate than our RR.

My mum's only been driving 40 years and still refuses to use it! then again she still also refuses to use 5th gear.

Terry Wogan once famously said, on his morning radio show, that Coventry was the only town with a ring road through the middle.

I sometimes wonder why a city that is perhaps the most de-centralised of the major cities in the UK even needs a ring road around such a small area. I've experienced the traffic around Kenilworth Road/Warwick University/Canley at rush hour and it's pretty busy. Yet every morning at rush hour I drive into an empty city centre without any problem at all. It amazes me that there's this heavy capacity road in a city centre that's in economic decline yet the road from the A46 to a major area of employment is a country lane (and it always baffled me as to why the six lanes of the A46 just appeared to stop! Until I realised it was supposed to go all the way through to the M6 via what has become 'Phoenix Highway' but the last section was canned!) Coventry seems to be saddled with the results of so many poorly thought out ideas and plans. The place feels half completed to me.

I sort of grew up with the Ring Road, it was completed around the time I started driving. I also worked for City Engineers for a while when I left school so was aware of how it was regarded as a prestige project. I believe it was all designed in-house by civil engineers at Broadgate House and Fleet House. They were doing Stage 6 when I was there, the last piece of the jigsaw. I don't have much of a problem with the Ring Road itself, as it has always been second nature to use it. My wife, on the other hand, isn't from Coventry and isn't confident at all using it. The centre was certainly congested before we had it. But it has almost been used as a new 'City Wall' in recent years. It avoids having to go through the city centre for through traffic, which is fine. Originally, if you wanted to use the centre itself, you could get there easily and park in West Orchards, Barracks or a number of other car parks. All this changed with the idea of stopping cars moving around the city centre. It was a deliberate policy, blocking off streets so you could only get a limited distance once you were in. Driving car users away from the centre is the single biggest reason why it is an economic wasteland now. Drivers tend to be the ones with money to spend, and they now go elsewhere. The Ring Road could have been a much greater boost to the city, but I don't believe it is to blame for its decline. It was a decent idea that became disjointed by poor planning afterwards.

There's actually some evidence that the ring road (Plus planned shopping precinct) have been partly responsible for the decline of the city centre. I posted a link to a study that highlights how changes to the urban network can affect a city. A lot of urban ring road plans were abandoned when it became clear how expensive, difficult and damaging they were - this is why we have a few cities with half completed schemes. These problems were known in Coventry, but they went ahead anyway and the consequences and damage inflicted are quite clear to see. Norwich has had plans for ring roads since the 1960s, but for a variety of reasons it never got built. If they'd adopted Coventry's brute force approach they would have just slapped it in regardless of existing roads or buildings. I am 100% convinced that whilst Coventry city centre is dominated by ring road and shopping ghetto, it will continue to decline whilst the 'edge cities' continue to grow.

I agree with Mister Di Di about the 'city wall' effect. I remember in the early 1990s when you could drive right into most of the city centre roads and get around the city centre. Over the years they seemed to close off the routes until you couldn't, and now they are reversing it, as you can now get around inside the centre. A thriving city centre is going to be busy. No amount of ring road building can prevent the congestion and traffic problems it'll bring. In some ways, ring roads were solutions looking for a problem. I wonder what would the ring road be like if Coventry was filled with large office blocks like Severn Trent? Thousands of drivers all trying to get into Little Park Street at 8:30? At the moment Severn Trent workers use the park and ride. Which I find a weird contradiction. Going back to city walls though: one of the reasons they removed them in the 19th century was because of the problems they caused with getting traffic into cities!

A couple of years ago, I got talking to a couple from Birmingham who had been to Coventry twice and driven round and round the ring road, looking for a road to somewhere (can`t remember where). We were in Homebase at Walsgrave at the time and they had given up and were going home and weren`t coming back.

This image totally captures what I meant about what we lost from the Ring Road development. Yes I know it's pre-war but just look at all the incredible buildings and roads that lay in the area the RR took over. The site has been discussed on other threads - definitely recommend following the quick logon process to enable zoom in viewing. You will be both amazed, and saddened.

Almost everyone I meet who has been to Coventry mentions how awful they think the ring road is.

You can't blame the Ring Road for the demise. Pedestrianisation and the way we shop is what is to blame. We buy groceries, beers wines and spirits for a week or longer from the big name stores, and our furniture is flat packed and can be transported home in the family car. Only large items like couches and white goods need to be delivered. Coventry was way ahead when it planned and built the city centre bypass. What it didn't have were the out of town strip malls like Orchard Park or whatever it is called these days. Look at the photos of Earlsdon High Street, packed with cars on both sides of the street, buses going up and down, running from one store blind to another when it was raining. I would imagine that the city centre was like that before the war. There were still vestiges of that time in Cross Cheaping when I was a kid. What are we missing? Ramshackle buildings which couldn't hold more than five customers at a time? Trying to cross the road with a basket or paper carrier bags in hand, squeezing through the parked cars, hoping that you got back to your destination before the string handles cut through your hands or the bottom of the bag fell out? Was that really fun? How about sliding past shop frontages on Trinity Street if there was ice and snow? A laugh a minute, eh. And what happened if you put your paper carrier bags down on a wet pavement to give your hands a break while waiting for the bus home? And what about the school which some of you were saddened to hear had been demolished? You weren't so keen on it when you sitting in fear of teacher who sat tapping an extra thick 12" ruler while waiting for you to get a word wrong when it was your turn to read a passage from the 'Adventures of Janet and John', were you. Couldn't get out fast enough when the bell rang. The worst of it for me and for you people is the destruction of MY/YOUR history, MY/YOUR path through life. You look back at the old days, and manage a laugh, but when you travel back to see it, there is nothing recognisable. It is like it never existed, like you have no history, nothing you can show your kids. Take photos of anything and everything. Looking back at them is way more fun than still having to live those old days. You can laugh about the time you stepped from under a rain filled store blind just as the shopkeeper shoved a broom up to clear the rain before it broke the blind, but it wasn't so damn funny at the time.

Fringe developments in Coventry have hastened the demise of the city centre, but the poor access created by the ring road hastened the decline of parts of the city centre and the way the Precinct and Ring Road altered movement around the city centre and removed important visual links to businesses has also affected this. This was apparent to me in 1989 when I came to Coventry and before most of the out-of-town shopping had really started. For a city of its size it had an oddly small city centre equivalent to a small town, and it was pretty clear that streets without any sort of footfall were struggling (and some with footfall were also struggling). Coventry may have been 'way ahead', but sometimes being a pioneer isn't good - everywhere else in the country quickly abandoned their plans for similar ring roads when the side effects became apparent and there were concerns over the damage they caused. These things have to be done carefully, not just blundered through - I wouldn't call a Ring Road that cuts off the main station from the city centre 'ground breaking', but an absolutely appalling disaster. Not sure what your point is about people crammed in shops is? Towns that have preserved their older buildings (such as Leamington, Skipton, Leeds, and areas like the Lanes in Leicester) are far more pleasant than cities like Coventry which are filled with badly designed shopping precincts and single use zones that haven't aged well and are poorly connected to existing street patterns. Old areas in Manchester city centre such as Saint Anne's square are so far better than Coventry's disgusting, decaying Precinct and has been pedestrianised. You don't need to demolish everything to pedestrianise it. Even if the building behind the front is in poor repair, the frontages can be retained and a modern building put up behind it... If you look at the Royal Priors in Leamington it's a modern development well integrated with the existing buildings. In Coventry they'd have just bulldozed the lot and stuck in some cheap red brick block with blank walls. This weekend I had the misfortune to walk past IKEA. It's almost quite staggering just how bad Coventry's townscape is. A city centre that has streets with blank walls running along them. It makes no sense at all. Streets make cities, and Coventry's lack of street pattern thanks to the ring road is what is destroying it. All IMHO.

Agreed Flap. Look at Hertford Street when it was actually a street. Then they made it pedestrianised - sealed up the Broadgate end into two small passageways into Broadgate - covered over some of it - then made the 'walkway' up from the Warwick Road end half ramp / half you then need to climb steps up. Ridiculous and has frankly been a deadzone for decades.