From the rubble of war, Coventry rebuilt a town centre hailed as a radical urban vision. Yet, even as it celebrates this heritage as UK city of culture, planners are plotting its destruction
‘The town of the future” is how Coventry was described in Our Land in the Making, a popular Ladybird book from 1966, heralding the Midlands city as a model of the brave new postwar world. It depicted a radical vision where shoppers roamed in novel “pedestrian precincts”, beautifully landscaped with gushing fountains and blossoming cherry trees, while cars were banished to ring roads and futuristic rooftop car parks, connected by aerial bridges. It may have been Britain’s motor city, but Coventry also knew how to make the town centre a pleasant place for people. The new shopping streets were human in scale: built with fine materials, boasting carefully integrated public art, signage, seating and planting – the new picturesquely planned to frame views of the old.
Fifty-five years on, Coventry is toasting its status as the 2021 UK city of culture with a “brutalist blue” ad campaign that celebrates the gritty concrete city in all its glory. The cathedral is shown emerging from a blazing inferno, dancers blend with the city’s modernist theatre, while basketball players merge with the startling elephantine sports centre, in a thrilling montage of speed and industry. Yet this great festival of Coventry culture comes at a time when much of the city’s pioneering postwar urban fabric is under threat. A gargantuan planning application has been submitted to demolish half of the town centre and replace it with a shopping mall with flats on top, in what has been condemned as a violent assault on the city’s modernist heritage, just when it should be being celebrated.
