Vicar Lane

A pair of mystery images from Pinterest. I don't know who posted them. I chased round the best part of two hours to find the source as nobody seems to have labelled them. I wondered for a bit if they were somewhere else but I finally worked out where they belong. They're the same area but looking north and then south from the ends. Neil will be pleased. If you've got the Sydney Bunney book, you might find a clue. It's possible that Kaga might remember this area. Can you work out where these excellent pictures were?

Bit confusing, the lorries look WWI, the houses look as if they should be sash, the only billiard hall I knew was Longford, but that fronted the main road, and the connecting bridge looks modern. Wasn't near enough to be the church next to it, so no, can't place it.

It's within the city proper and can't be any older than about 1913 because the connecting bridge wasn't built until then. It may have changed by your time, especially as it's not the sort of place kids would venture, so you might not have walked through this area until you were older. If at all.

Absolutely fantastic, Helen - image finds of the year for me. That has to be Vicar Lane!

Give the man a prize they are Vicar Lane In the first photo, the rounded buttress on the left is the corner of the Sunday school. The building to the right is the King's Head Tap. Next to which was a passageway along the edge of the Corn Exchange. The Sydney Bunney pictures explain some of the features. The jettied building on the left of the second photo is the back end of the building that faced onto Smithford Street.

Truly brill, Helen. Been looking for some proper shots of Vicar Lane for ages. How did they pop up? We really need to find out who posted - and what others they may have! I now also realise that the one photo we did already have is taken from underneath the bridge - you can see it at the top of the photo without me ever realising what it was. Do you know what it was for - presumably Iliffe's printing works, or was that later?

I was following a Pinterest link - (they usually just yield regular stuff) and spotted the Billiards photo. I was dubious it was Coventry because I'd not seen anything similar. I clicked on it and in and out of a few pages and then up popped the one looking the other direction that triggered memories of a Bunney painting. Saved the pictures but not the locations before going out but when I came back, after confirming it was Vicar Lane, I took two hours to find them again. I too wondered if there were any more but I couldn't find any. Those two weren't at the same person's page, but they must be posted by the same person somewhere. They're too similar to be a co-incidence. It's one of things I really dislike about Pinterest - that the source isn't easy to trace back. Pages get in a muddle because people link to all sorts of things.

Yes, that image from the bombing fits well. I've overlooked it before.

Helen F Can't remember if I ever went in the street or not, but the regimental band at the barracks played in the square, or at the Kings Head Hotel, but the vicar of that lane, the Rev Sibree, complained of the noise to authorities, and the band was stopped, much to the chagrin of the people, and the regiment moved to Birmingham.

I don't know where the vicar lived but the Sunday School was close to the Barracks. I can imagine that hearing them practice day in, day out might have grated after a while. Especially if you could only hear the beat.

Helen F The Kings Head Hotel was the posh hotel, but if you had a back room over Vicar Lane, it doesn't look very good, and there is no way that lorry could turn round - in one end, out t'other. But that picture tells me Joe Davis must have visited Coventry many times.

If that was their tap room on Vicar Lane, I'm guessing deliveries would have been made from the hotel front - although on maps there were quite a few buildings between the back of the hotel and Vicar Lane. Were they all the hotel?

By the time the photo was taken, the Corn Exchange was the Empire Theatre and the Sunday School was part of the printing works. It would have been possible to turn alongside the repurposed Sunday School - hence the substantial brick corner, acting partly as a bollard. It would have been tight. As you write Kaga, it wasn't a salubrious area, despite its proximity to the King's Head. Go back 60 years and it was a lot more upmarket. 60 years before that it was a quiet little lane leading to fields with the Barracks not built until 1793. My knowledge of these areas starts from the oldest images I can find, so I find it hard to picture what came later. However if I can find a photograph with some of the older buildings on (eg the King's Head Tap can be seen on a very old sketch of the Vicar Lane Meeting House) I can accurately place the demolished buildings and work out their scale.

That area at the end does look a lot more open in Bunney's painting, doesn't it Helen.

It does Neil, although the bridge says that they were contemporary. Camera view vs eye view are often quite different. The black and white also makes the scene look dark and grungy. Certainly that end was wider than the entrance to Vicar Lane. I find it very hard to judge vertical scale - part of the reason I'm not whistling along with the buildings.