Jordan Well

     

No worries, I got the images from a book with many 'before and after', images. Perhaps the author had a limited choice of views, even though it was still Jordan Well? Some of them are interesting to me since they are from about 1973.

Since many buildings in Jordan Well were flattened and the town planners finished off those survived near Cox Street there was nothing much to photograph in 1973. The new museum was one of the new replacements, followed by the Polytechnic. At the other end of time, the same view of the end of Bayley Lane was interesting by modern standards but pre war it was a bit mundane. Maybe there were photographs but I've not seen them.

I think this has been seen before but nice size for detail, sad as it is.

Yes Neil, a good copy of a well known image. It also shows more to the left and right than most copies. To place the location, the building on the left with the mock Tudor fa

NeilsYard, could it be there were so many pubs, that work was more physical, 'elbow grease', none of today's modern gadgets, so more tiring, more thirsty.

Before Lynes there was the Acorn pub Christine Hill Post copied from topic Shops of yore on 27th Nov 2018 7:04 pm

Of all the cities I have read about, Coventry is still the most fascinating, interesting and laughable of them all. I have no idea if other people find it such. Jordan Well was only a few hundred yards long, but it had a well, made of work-red sandstone walls about five feet in diameter, circular in form, mostly a distance from the pumps, the water carried from the well to pump by wooden tree. But as roads were widened found in the middle of the road. Jordan Well named from a man named Jordan Sheppey, who later became Mayor, sold water from the well. The people, annoyed, dug another well farther on and cut him out. This well was close to the Colin Campbell public house. Earl St came from Guy, Earl of Warwick, another amusing story of the Dun Cow. High St, Jordan Well, Earl St - three separate but joined as one. Jordan was a popular name from the Crusaders.

Home and Colonial stores was there in Jordan Well, and a sports shop with ancient moth-eaten swimming costumes in the upstairs room with a lumpy carpeted floor. This was just after the war. Victors ice cream shop was in Whitefriars Street. Every day as we waited for the bus, an old man with a big rubber apron pushed a giant block of ice on a sack truck from Freeth Street to their shop by the bus stop.

There were many stories about the Dun Cow Inn, but the one I knew best, and liked the most, I was told by my father when I was about five. About the time of the Knights, there was close to Coventry a very large heath called Dunsmore and the village of that name, but other villages took the name - Dunchurch, Ryton-on-Dunsmore, Stretton-on-Dunsmore, etc. On this heath roamed wild cattle - one cow grew to enormous size. This monstrous beast raided village crops and gored anyone that got in its way. The villagers turned to the Lord of the Manor to kill it. When the Lord met the beast he was afraid, so in humiliation he asked the Earl of Warwick, but he also was afraid of the great beast, so they asked a witch to cast a spell on the beast. She did and when it quietened she produced a sieve and milked the cow. When the beast saw it could not fill the pail it died of a broken heart. Both knights took a rib from the cow and gave the meat to the villagers. Each knight took a rib, one to be nailed to a beam in the Manor House, the other went to be hung in Warwick Castle. So for many centuries the people in Coventry and villages believed in the story and inns took the name Dun Cow, because of the bones. But not the end of story - guess?

The witch cursed them both for being cowards, saying if they ever parted with the ribs their families would die out, so one rib hung in the Manor House and one rib in Warwick Castle. The ribs were very convincing, they could only have come from a very huge beast. But with modern methods, the great ribs were carbon dated around the eighties time. And whey ho! It had been a huge con over centuries, they were two sides of a minke whale's lower jaw. I believe they both are still in place today?