Inner Ring Road

The closure of Hertford Street to traffic also added a total of 50,000 miles per year to the routes used by Coventry Transport's buses! I remember our school bus swerving to the left and heading off into the opposite direction we were meant to be going before rejoining the original route further on.

The out-of-town retail developments for me merely sped up the decline of the city centre. By then there was already the start of a trend of people (especially those more affluent) to go to Birmingham for shopping, which has since spread to include Leamington, Solihull and Leicester. Is the council still basing its latest regeneration around retail, or has it yet realised that this is a quickly diminishing market thanks to online retail and had a rethink? I'm not even sure offices is the way to go as I can see that contracting with more people working from home etc. Which sort of leaves housing and entertainment/tourism.

Hertford Street was almost traffic-free in the 1920's!

Surely everywhere was almost traffic-free in the 1920s?

Just heard on the radio that "The Coventry Society" are holding a meeting tonight discussing Coventry's ring road. It's being held at the "The Shop Front - Theatre Absolute" (at the end of the City Arcade - opposite Argos) and entrance to non-members is just one pound.

The space it takes up is immense compared to the size of the city centre, IMHO... Especially the junctions around the bus station and Sky Blue Way. The amount of space underneath and around all the flyovers is quite substantial. It kind of reduces whole areas to nothing but flyovers and hollow, empty space beneath them - which is odd when you consider that the whole point of keeping roads separate like that was to make more space for pedestrians! I love the bit where you have the chunk of city wall underneath it. I see it every day, and always remember seeing an interview with an 'engineer' responsible for the ring road who complained about finding bits of medieval wall when they were trying to build the road. I don't like the road much, but at the same time I find the brutal, empty landscape it has created quite fascinating & appealing to the side of me that likes abandoned, empty places - feet away from a busy (ish - I don't find the ring road that busy much these days) are these networks of tunnels that virtually no one uses. During the summer I spent a bit of time cycling around the city and the areas around the ring road and the tunnels are so empty it's quite eerie. I seem to recall stumbling drunk through them at one point as well. Since they made the surface level crossing at the station the place feels a lot better to use, but also made a lot of the subways redundant... I spent some time exploring around Whitefriars and that area is really quite eerie. It's like something out of a JG Ballard novel.

I was surprised to read Flapdoodle found the ring road was not busy these days.

I use it twice a day at rush hour, and find that the main carriageway is actually fairly empty in places, but the slip roads for certain routes can be jammed up. The A45 junction mainly is very busy, and the station one can sometimes be a bit busy. The A45 usually has queuing traffic on the ring road itself and also on the slip roads. In the evening, there's usually a lot of traffic going from Sky Blue Way to London Road, but nothing going towards Foleshill Road. Sometimes, stretches of the road between junctions are virtually empty (the flyover from London Road - Foleshill Road, for example). It's very odd. It does make me wonder if it's been somewhat over-engineered, and just moves traffic jams from the centre to the suburbs. Most of Coventry's traffic is on the outskirts these days - I once went to Warwick Uni at rush hour and the traffic is almost unbelievable around there. One of the largest areas of employment in the city and it's accessed by what amount to country lanes. Absolutely ridiculous. Yet where there's a huge ring road, there's virtually no businesses, and the only business of note (Severn Trent) uses a park and ride!

I know I've mentioned before but the swathe of land cleared to make way for the ring road is unbelievable.

I think the postwar developers got it wrong by not rebuilding the blitzed centre exactly as it was. Rebuilding puts the heart back into something that man attempted to destroy. It doesnt matter about the sizes of buildings and streets - the buildings may be combined and modernised inside the recreated frontages to give better spaces and the ring road would have had a proper purpose in linking up the narrow streets of the old and historic centre. The postwar developers and builders easily tempted naive counsellors of the so-said benefits of total re-development as there was big money to be made. Of course, industry has moved on, but today the old classic buildings would have made a great retail and tourist area. I have visited some bombed towns in eastern France and parts of Germany and after the war they put many of them back just how they were and this brought the population back too - they had a sense of belonging instead of staring in wonderment at the concrete jungle of the Precinct. It's too late now in Coventry and sadly the appearance of much of the '50's and '60's architecture does not stand the test of time when the concrete becomes stained.