Coventry's Universities

I totally agree with you AD, I use the city centre regularly and find it fine. I have never felt threatened by students and certainly the city centre is nothing like as violent as it was in the 70's and 80's. I work with students and most of them find that Coventry is much better than they have been led to believe by the press. My economy of my home city almost collapsed entirely with the end of manufacturing. The only thing that saved it was building a university to regenerate the city centre. Don't forget that between them Coventry's two universities employ over four thousand, many from the local area which also has a significant impact on the local economy

Hi all There are very positive reports regards the achievement of our Coventry University. It has moved up ten places in the league of Universities world wide & is now ranked top of the "New" universities, anywhere. This is more important than ever as there is a drop-off in UK university applications, which was predicted.

It's what you make it. Some people used to turn up already hating the city due to its reputation for violence & somewhat grim appearance. Coventry wasn't 'studenty' when I was an undergraduate at Cov Uni, but I still had a great time (and ended up coming back to work and study some more). I tended to avoid the places where students went and preferred the 'local' pubs. As I came from a small town of 30,000, Coventry seemed huge and intimidating, and the view from my hall of residence was a wall of concrete and curious tunnels where people used to vanish into or appear from all day. Police sirens seemed to go on all night. I can still remember the look on my mum's face as they dropped me off in 1989 for the first time and my dad took the wrong exit off the motorway and ended up driving through Foleshill (and then the subsequent panic as we got on the ring road and tried to locate Priory Hall). I can still remember the first time a group of us had to go out to Spon End way someone's house. I can just remember endless subways, which seemed quite frightening as I was not used to them. I'm sure back in the early 1990s it was a busy city centre - weekends were usually heaving, and there was a lot of people around in places like the Burges/Corporation Street. Although I was shocked that there was no McDonald's in the city centre and surprised to find Dillons bookshop was small and didn't really have much in it (I was so pleased when they moved into the bigger store in Cathedral Lanes!). The people who did the city the biggest disservice was the student union who gave us Freshers a guide book which was full of smart-alec comments about how rough the place was and you should avoid going anywhere (oddly, a lot of the places are now long gone). And the unfortunate myth about it being the most violent city in Europe persisted - the Burges was a bit frightening at nights. The guide recommended avoiding all the subways and Precinct at night. I recall leaving the Dog and Trumpet via the back door and we were lost in a maze of car parks and service areas. I did a year at Warwick, and the paranoia there about Coventry was... excessive. The way some people talked about the city, you'd think students got their heads beat up as soon as they stepped off campus. I did know a few people who got attacked for being students, and did come across some unpleasant locals in some pubs who did sit there and blatantly insult us (even though we were actually all working by then and no longer students!) but that was a minority. When I started at GPT, we used to get sarcastic e-mails (mainly from people at the Nottingham site) on one of the mailings lists for graduates about how Coventry was the 'city that closed at 5'. I actually think in the 'rush' to regenerate, a lot of the character and grit has been replaced by sterile and empty streets. I must admit, though, that when I did visit friends in other cities, I did sometimes feel a bit jealous.

I don't understand why Coventrians get so uptight when outsiders accuse the city of being grimy and violent. It was. There was a time when police used to go into the Precinct in 15 seater minibus type vehicles because one or two on foot would have no chance. Fights in and outside of pubs and clubs were not exactly unknown. Back in the good old days, there were a lot of slums and decrepit buildings, but Coventry was never going to be like Brighton, Eastbourne, or Chipping Camden. Coventry was an industrial city way before industry became fashionable, and its greatness was what the people made, not the look or gentility of the place. You can't have an industrial history as great as Coventry but with the feel of Bath. It is never going to happen and that's not a bad thing. A lot of the old infrastructure has been bulldozed, even the good bits like Broadgate in the 60's, and there is a push to make Coventry a 'hip' place. Trouble is that Coventry isn't a 'hip' place and the Coventry people are not 'hip' people.

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Moderator's note : Steady, lads - you make very valid points and strong arguments, but . . . the subject of this thread is "Coventry University" - can we please be sure we don't deviate from this, there are other threads about how the city's industry has grown, shrunk, changed, etc.

The Telegraph reports that the former Allied Carpets store in Corporation St is to become guess what?

I don't know what people expect the owners of these buildings to do. They're clearly not wanted by businesses or retailers and some of them have been empty for years. It's also clear that people don't want to live in the city centre as there's no market for apartments there. The Uni is growing. If owned one of those tatty post-war office buildings I'd be looking at turning it into student flats!

First look at student flats planned for old Allied Carpets building

Thanks Dreamtime. You really are a member of the "dream team". Now you`ve answered that I`d be interested to know a little more about the "curly" images shown on Robin`s Pics, I suppose they could also represent wood shavings - long strips that curl when planed - but to me the first thing that came to mind was Herbert`s. Incidentally my uncle Fred Tomlinson worked as a Toolmaker at Herberts, probably 1930s to 1960s Post copied from topic Alfred Herbert's on 29th Sep 2015 9:57 am

Robin I have now spotted that your pics have numbers, the one with the "curly statues" was P1030861. Is it possible you could post it on here to see if anybody else thinks it is meant as reminder of "Herbert`s Worm Turnings" I was "working" at the University of Warwick in the 1970s as a Builders SurveyorSports and Computer Centres with a firm called Truscon and then moved on to Gleesons and worked on the Chapel, Arts Centre, and Students Community Centre Oh those awful white tiles that kept falling off. Post copied from topic Alfred Herbert's on 29th Sep 2015 9:58 am

Considering the influence they have on our city's post-1970s development I thought I'd give them their own topic. I worked at each for a year 1972 to 1973 in the Art History Dept of the Lanchester Polytechnic as Coventry University then was and from 1973 to 1974 in the Audio Visual Aids at Warwick. I'll add more posts later. Moderators' note: We have merged this post, and its responses, with the existing "Coventry University" thread, which has been renamed to cover both establishments

This is the image that Roger Turner was referring to in the Earlsdon Village thread.