On 20th Oct 2011 1:57pm, PhiliPamInCoventry said:
Today, I have been walking with old friends in Coventry city centre. I try to resist running my own city down, just for the sake of it, as Coventry has given me a very good living. I do however share the view of my friends who are visiting the area, that Coventry today resembled a builders yard. One of the visitors was here two years ago, when the Ironmonger Row saga of stop-go was ongoing. It does seem really as though our city planners have lost their way, lacking the guidance of robust forward planning. Over a cup of coffee, I was told that the coach party that my friends were with in general will be in no hurry to come again. Most places go through periods of re-development, like Stratford, but Coventry's never seems to come to an end. 
Dig a hole & move it mentality.
Today I went into Coventry City Centre for a bit of shopping. I went on the 16 bus ..... what a three-day camel hike it has become to get into the town now that you can't alight at the Belgrade. It's either a long walk from near to Wickes, or from the furthest stop possible in the bus station, although I still have to go to that awful Burges stop to return where there is no proper shelter or anywhere to sit or rest heavy bags!! And it seems the whole place is being dug up .... Not sure what they are doing near the Britannia hotel but that was all coned off on Fairfax Street, and there is work going on under those awful boomerang things, sorry, the Whittle Arch. It was always an accident waiting to happen there, with what looked like a pedestrian area, then a bus would come charging through. Whoever designed that needs sacking. It looks as though they are making a separate little road next to the original. Then I passed the Belgrade on the bus, it is all dug up outside there by the fountain and our bus stop has moved up to outside the Premier Inn. And now the lovely old Co-op is all empty; I used to love looking around the "Rooms" part of it, very classy. Oh well, we have our Pound Shops, and Primark, and American style coffee shops you would have to pay me to go in; what more could we ask. I don't like Coventry any more. Dig a hole & move it mentality.
And I mean rough. There are some very good books out there about the city. Start with some of the newer ones because while interesting, the older ones often didn't have access to modern techniques and understanding.
Several things I should clarify. The true age of the city before the war was very hard to determine because like us people were forever adding bits and knocking sections down. Only dendro dating is showing how old some places are. A lot of Tudor building was actually repair and development work to very sturdy medieval frames. Some sections of the city were older than their location because for the Civil War (Cromwell etc) houses just outside the city walls were removed and often rebuilt in their entirety within the city. eg Warwick lane moved from outside the gates to inside, onto the land that had been the Greyfriar's priory before the dissolution. Parts of New Buildings and other areas round the ruins of St Mary's were also built for those displaced for the Civil War. It was probably a measure of Coventry's decline that those lands were still available. In a similar fashion it was some time after the War before the vacated land was rebuilt with spacious Georgian homes.
Medieval buildings were often parallel to the street and 2 or three 'bays' wide. The main part, the hall, would have been open to the ceiling. Once chimneys became common, the hall could have an upper floor, doubling the upstairs immediately. Originally a lot of the city was just 2 storey, facing onto the street and at the time the roadways weren't cramped and overhung the way London looked at the time. Later development often dropped the line of the upper floor to the ground, cutting the pavements in half or altogether, giving us a flawed impression of narrow roadways in the medieval era. Roadways were also lower than today or in the b/w photos. Market areas were common but were sometimes filled in by the Tudors and then opened up again, often in a different direction, under the Georgians. Broadgate seems to have followed that pattern, shifting to the west as fashions changed.
When houses became scarce but trade outside the city allowed for less home grown stuff, the owners could start extending out the back. Back gardens were long and thin 'burgage' plots so development out the back was often long and thin. Once a house had back rooms, the front could be divided into two or more properties. The original front and back doors became a shared passage to the back. As space became even more in demand, the individual rooms were turned into properties. Turning what had been originally quite roomy homes into 'houses of multiple occupancy' to use the modern terminology. One room up, one room down terraces snaked back from the original house along the gardens that weren't as important any more. Later, a third storey was added to create the top shops, where big windows and the height allowed people to work on looms in their own home.
While the town planners are responsible for brutally destroying large stretches of the city before Hitler got the chance, the repair techniques used once the Georgian look came in and onwards made demolition almost an imperative. Once encased in mortar, brick and concrete render, the wood started to rot at a highly accelerated rate. The properties would have been death traps of mould, sewage and disease.
Final point. Coventry seems to have had a very good fire prevention strategy. It did away with wooden chimneys and thatch very early (I'll add the date if I find it). Well before the Great Fire of London, Coventry had tile as standard throughout the city. Later it installed fire walls, breaking up long stretches of timber buildings with fire break, brick partitions. Of those stretches of buildings that survived the bombing, there were usually brick buildings bookending the group.
