Helen F - Modelling the city

Amazing!!!

The next area is West Orchard, bringing together many different images, including one of Anne's rare sketches, documents for the Bablake school trust and a child's drawing. Note that there are no geographical features, including the channel for the river.

I feel just like Rob in wanting to walk the streets of Old Coventry and whereas I could do it only in imagination what you are doing Helen is just fantastic. What a difficult but inspiring project this is! Congratulations!

Thanks for all the kind words. This really is a community effort because without you all it wouldn't be possible. Prof, I'm new to imagining Coventry but I hope I can do it justice. The final result will still be quite guessy but it will explain quite a few details that aren't immediately apparent from the sketches and paintings. It'll be several years before it's finished assuming I don't lose impetus. Next up is Ironmonger Row and the Bull Ring area. The building opposite the Pilgrim's Rest was called the Meal Hall (or Meat Hall). It stretched from the Bull Ring all the way to Cross Cheaping. It was a significant building but I've never read much about it. Anyone else heard of it? Guess where I found some info on the meal hall?

Ah, good ol' J.B. Shelton, I'm so glad his fantastic 1930s articles have come in handy - without him we would be so much worse off for our knowledge of the old Coventry beneath our feet. My biggest wish, though, is that he'd taken a camera around with him, as we're still left wondering about so many things that he described in the limited time he could muster before the builders moved in.

I thought you might like to see this Helen, from The Sphere newspaper 1934

It was a great little model wasn't it Anne. They've caught the feeling of the city.

I thought an update was in order. I had hoped to have finished the rough version by now but COVENTRY HAS SO MANY BUILDINGS ARGHHHHH. Here's the map showing what's done. Still to complete is the south side of Fleet Street which is quite a trial as there isn't even a map for half of it. Smithford Street north and south to do. A lot of yards and back alleys and few half timbered fronts but at least there are good pictures in Britain From Above. Grey Friars Lane and Warwick Lane are part done but at least there aren't a lot of rear buildings. Finally St John's Lane or Dead Lane which might be a pig. There aren't many images of this street at all. I'm not even sure how much of what survived until the war was old. On the plus side there isn't a lot of back buildings and there were gaps. This is the end of Spon End and the latest bit I've completed. On the left is Spon End Mill and on the right is my guess at the leper chapel. Bit of a stretch from the barn it was turned into. Ford's Hospital with its missing wing. Here's the Bablake School with the full quadrangle. The stone building between the church and the yard is called the Bridewell in a number of sources, but despite its charming name it was for prisoners not choristers, the original purpose of the school. Some of the block was also a hospital (more like a home for the elderly usually). So the young, the old and the criminals in one big complex. Beyond St Johns is the Spon Gate. I've been working on the logic of gatehouses and it's not simple to add the drawbridge, the wicket gates (big door with a little door inset for pedestrians) and the portcullises. Not to mention winding gear, chains, stairwells and murder holes. Beyond the gate you can see Spon Street and the first structures on the left are the buildings Fretton drew. Last I've added my version of Cheylesmore manor. At one point it was thought that there was a central hall but following the various archaeological books it seems the first hall was later built into the city wall. I've based my guess on various fortified halls and the footprint from one of the digs. Part of the range on the left is the surviving gate house and the range to the right of it survived until the 50s? Only the buildings bottom right are totally speculative.

I ought to add that the leper chapel and hospital weren't the same as the chapel near the bridge but further out, just off Hearsall Lane.

Great stuff again Helen - I hope you'll be in negotiation with The Herbert about your work

Fantastic progress. You're almost creating a pre-aircraft version of Britain from Above. If only someone had taken an early camera up in a balloon.

Thank you, you're both very kind. At the moment I'm using the editor screen to take photos and they work best as aerial shots. It also makes it easier to orientate anyone looking at them. On human eye level it gives a Google Street view effect which is a bit weird. I'm just getting into animation and that includes fly-throughs. You can then adjust the camera to simulate more natural vision. Like Pete from Coventry Rebuilt has done, I hope to make some videos. I'm planning that by the end of this year I will have finished the land contours, built all the gate houses and walls, some of the well known buildings and a street or two. Enough to attract some serious interest as opposed to polite disbelief. I've still got work to do on getting the height of buildings right but in many ways I'm further on than I expected to be. I'm trying to run it like a real project with planning and stuff so I don't have to redo too much. Hee, hee. Well trying anyway. I keep being diverted by side issues like cellars and details unnecessary to my model like St Mary's Cathedral and the castle. I'm being greedy wanting to add as many details as possible but it's best to decide before I start the real buildings. I never planned to do the inner workings of the gate house but calculating the outside requires understanding of how they operated. It's not a massive amount of extra work to add the rest. Maybe. I need to build with capacity to add all the extra bits if I get the time and enthusiasm at a later date. The final touches will be to add animals, trees (maybe that sway in the wind), weather, changing light and the bits and pieces of life in that period. Some of that I can do myself but there are some very interesting packages that will do all the hard parts.

Fantastic Helen, and good luck with the 'hard parts'. If you can't do it nobody will. You must love what you are doing as it shows.

I do love it Dreamtime, give or take the hard work. It's a great puzzle. It involves visiting historic buildings. Photography. New computers. Graphics software. Building cool stuff without getting mucky, tired or splinters. Learning new skills and facts. Conversations (real or virtual) and breakfasts with great people. What's not to love

Hi. I just noticed that I hadn't put up all the pictures I'd saved, so here are the last three. I've almost finished the full rough model. The few missing bits that are a bit boring so I lost interest for a while. The areas are mostly in the south of the city which was very poorly covered for images. St John's Lane is a bit of an enigma and Greyfriars Lane is just complicated. I have started on the Spon Street Gate and it's looking promising although it's almost as complicated to model as one of the churches. Bishop Street and Silver Street. One thing to note is that the front metre or so of the stone grammar school was removed to push the building in line with the rest of the street. They halved the depth of the tower. Without understanding that it was hard to reconcile the different images.