Coventry tourist information
Coventry England
Six hundred years ago Coventry ranked fourth among England's cities in size and importance and at its heart still stands reminders of that golden age - one of the country's finest mediaeval guildhalls, almshouses and monastic foundations, timber framed shops and pubs and the two great central churches of Holy Trinity and St Michael's, the famous ruined cathedral. The medieval street pattern that framed these startling buildings was already beginning to disappear, even before Hitler's bombers turned the old city into dust. And now the post war city centre that replaced it, with its pioneering pedestrian precincts and contemporary cityscapes, is changing again.
New bars and eating places are springing up in the historic Cathedral Quarter. A huge entertainment and leisure complex is rising on a site where factories once stood.
A major project for the Millennium will transform one whole side of the central area, exciting plans for more shopping promise to do the same for another.
Alongside the city centre’s key visitor attractions, its world-class motor museum, the clutch of historic buildings and Basil Spence's extraordinary modern cathedral, a programme of festivals and events is breathing new life into the heart of Coventry.
Birthplace of the Godiva legend and the motor car in Britain; victim of the blitzkreig and a centre of international peace and reconciliation; once a medieval walled city and now a multi-cultural city of innovation – Coventry.
Once a scattered settlement when Leofric, Earl of Mercia and his wife Godiva founded a church here in the 1040s, by the end of the 14 th century, Coventry was the fourth most powerful city in England.
It had enormous wealth; had become a major centre of pilgrimage and its royal charter of 1345 had been the first of its kind in England. But within 50 years the Golden Age was over, destroyed by a crisis in the wool and cloth trade.
The medieval wall, which rivalled London’s, protected the city from the worst ravages of the Wars of the Roses, and the city slowly recovered. During the Civil War, Coventry as a strongly Parliamentarian city, was used to house Royalist prisoners, hence the term “sent to Coventry”. As a result, the city fell out of favour with the Stuarts and on accession to the throne, Charles II ordered the town wall and its defences to be destroyed.
During the industrial revolution Coventry had a staple industry based on ribbon weaving. But by the time the writer George Eliot came to know the city in the 1830s (Coventry was the model for her novel Middlemarch), the city was heading for bad times. The introduction of mechanised looms into a weaving industry caused extreme poverty. Watchmaking rose and declined, undermined by foreign competition. But from humble beginnings in the 1860s the city quickly became the home of the sewing machine, with the formation of a sewing machine factory by James Starley. The late 1860’s saw Starley switch from sewing machines to bicycles and become Britain’s first bicycle maker – based in Coventry.. As that industry declined to the end of the century, Daimler began making cars in a disused cotton mill, an industry that would lay the foundations for the city’s 20 th century expansion.
As late as 1920 the city was being described as the best preserved medieval town in Europe, but what wasn’t cleared for cars, was destroyed on the night of 14 November 1940. Coventry was subjected to the single most concentrated attack on a British city in World War II. The raid lasted 11 hours, with 43,000 homes damaged or destroyed, and the great mediavel church of St Michaels destroyed – the only cathedral to be destroyed in World War II. Its central library, market hall and hundreds of shops and public buildings were destroyed. The official death toll was 554, but the real figure could have been much higher as many were unaccounted for.
The day after the blitz a decision was taken to rebuild the cathedral as a testament to peace and reconciliation. By 1947 Coventry had adopted its first German twin city, Kiel. Dresden followed in 1956. Coventry has now twinned with 26 cities globally.
More than 200 architects submitted designs to an international competition in 1947 for the new cathedral. The winner was Basil Spence. In 1962 the new cathedral was consecrated in the presence of the Queen, taking the total of Coventry’s cathedrals to three.
During the 1970s and 1980s, Coventry plummeted into recession, with factory closures, steeping unemployment rates, which gave the city a bleak and dispiriting feel, prompting the song “Ghost Town” by the Coventry band The Specials.
Coventry now boasts two universities – the University of Warwick and the University of Coventry. The city’s business and science parks are some of the most successful in the Midlands and links with Europe are thriving. Initiatives such as the SkyDome arena; LeisureWorld and Arena are set to revitalise and raise the city’s profile immensely, while a £33m project to transform the Lower Precinct and retail market into a revitalised, prosperous shopping centre will make the city one which Coventry people can be proud of and visitors will be happy to return.
Coventry aerial map
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