Forum Features & Updates

Thanks folks, I appreciate that! It's good to know that it comes in useful. (I know I've used it myself many times!) But as of this very afternoon, all I want to say is.... PHEW, it's done! After nearly four years, adding a little bit here and there, we finally have as complete a record as I can find of every show ever performed at the New and Old Hippodromes, the short-lived Tin Hippodrome, and before that, the temporary Circus buildings specially erected for each run of shows on Pool Meadow. P.S. I've just added it to the Useful links page for convenience.

I thought that there were more than the last time I looked They're a useful dating tool, especially combined with some of the Coventry Digital images where we can zoom into posters and the Hippodrome.

Rob, I take my hat off to you, you provide such a sterling service for us all, this record will prove invaluable for many of us so well done!!! Geoff

Thank you so much! It's the lovely responses I get like these which make all my projects so very worthwhile.

Rob, You must be a very busy man, how many projects have you got on the go, or is that being too personal? I would have thought running Historic Coventry would be a job in itself. Best wishes, Geoff

Oh, it's not personal at all, I don't mind questions like that! The website, starting out as a family genealogy website, was, and still is, a hobby I began in 2002. (I've got more details about that, and why, on this page on HC.) With 22 years passing since then, just an hour or two every other day or so soon mounts up to what looks like a huge website, but it's not really been as labour-intensive as it might look at first sight. (The Updates pages, in reverse date order, give a full story of what I did and when.) One of the current projects is checking and updating each page of the Pub website, which has been ongoing for over 5 years now.... with no end in sight!!! Much of the original research was carried out by Fred Luckett and John Ashby over 20 years ago - with far more limited resources than we have available nowadays. With more availability of newspaper archives I can now cross-check a lot more detail about pubs opening and closing down, license transfers, locations, and all sorts of things. There are still quite a few pubs that we've not quite got an exact location for, so if anyone on here ever wishes to contribute any knowledge, much gratitude would come your way! Some ideas for improvements to the site(s) are suggested by the lovely, helpful folk on here. Something that Helen mentioned a while ago about J. B. Shelton's articles has given me possibly my next project, which will be to link photographs and map-locations to each article, so it will be a little more obvious where he was digging around back in the 1930s. The fledgling Stoke website also needs a lot more work, which I've neglected a little since starting it over two years ago. If anyone on here has some nice Stoke memories or tales, they would make a great addition to that site. But it's all good fun really, and long may it continue to be....

I've got a few thoughts about the pubs and Shelton's articles. The hard part is to form a coherent way of imparting that eg The original location of the Spread Eagle on West Orchard would have been number 11 (based on counting back from 26 or number 9 counting the other way ) and only moved to 26 after the market was built. However, were the properties numbered at that point? I know that the Coach and Horses (previously the Black Bear) moved from 128/9 to 39, which was probably already the Half Moon and Severn Stars. That's why it's very hard to marry the records together. Just the name of 39 changed and the original Coach & Horses ceased to be. That flexible arrangement probably messes up several pub records. I come across bits and bobs about pubs regularly. The same applies to Shelton's articles. How do I let you know what I know? Perhaps you could create a topic for each article as you consider it, and we can chip in with help?

Definitely a great idea, Helen, having a dedicated topic to specific points of research. Street numbers can be a right ol' inconsistent pain, as I know you know! Searching briefly through a few newspapers, the earliest I just found was 1848, so at least they appear to have been established before the Spread Eagle moved. And, as you've mentioned on here before, buildings merge or split, or streets get extended, and can get completely renumbered - sometimes more than once! But let's have some fun along the way, a co-operative effort can yield amazing results.