‘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.
“It’s shocking to see the lack of consideration our own council has for the heritage of our city,” says Vincent Hammersley, chair of The Coventry Society, which has been battling the plans. “I played in the rubble of the second world war bombsites as a kid. To see the city being rebuilt was something we were incredibly proud of. Now, to see it going under the wrecking ball, simply to please London developers, is a total disgrace. It’s absolute vandalism.”
The Twentieth Century Society, which fights for buildings from that era, has also lodged fierce objections to the £360m scheme, designed by Chapman Taylor architects for the Shearer Property Group, describing the proposals as “totally unacceptable”. Case worker Coco Whittaker explains: “We believe the site is an important example of the replanning and building of Coventry in the postwar period, home to low-rise retail blocks with connected rooftop carparks. Such buildings could be sympathetically refurbished and reused as part of an effort to invest in and improve the area.”
The 15-acre site of the City Centre South plan, a joint venture with the council, encompasses a substantial chunk of the pedestrianised town centre, designed by city architect and planning officer Arthur Ling from 1955, and later Terence Gregory from 1963. Inspired by visits to Rotterdam to see the pioneering Lijnbaan shopping street, the architects created a low-rise network of streets, arcades and squares, on a scale that referenced the “cosy streets” of prewar Coventry, as Ling put it, “meeting the demand for enclosure of space on a human scale”.
The city is home to some of the finest examples of postwar architecture in the UK, from Sir Basil Spence’s stirring transformation of the war-bombed cathedral, to the Belgrade Theatre by Ling, and the circular, car park-crowned central market, all protected by listing. But the modest background structure of the town centre – including the threatened Bull Yard, Shelton Square, Market Way, City Arcade and Hertford Street – is often overlooked.
“It tends to go under the radar,” says Louise Campbell, professor of architectural history at nearby University of Warwick, “because it’s not showy. It doesn’t scream at you. But the precinct offers a really interesting variety of vistas, with curved streets and ramps, and details that give interest to the experience of moving through the town centre, like the sculptural bronzed-fibreglass relief panels above the shops. By contrast, what is being proposed by the developers bears no relation to Coventry. It could be Milton Keynes, or Minneapolis, or Magnitogorsk.”
Campbell and the Twentieth Century Society are also concerned for the fate of a number of public art works, including a wild Aztec-style concrete relief mural created by William Mitchell in 1966 for the former Three Tuns pub, as well as a relief of Sir Guy and the Dun Cow by Alma Ramsey. The developers say they plan to relocate Mitchell’s grade II-listed relief, but quite how they will recreate the effect of the two-sided sculpture, which is carved on the inside and the outside of the building’s concrete walls, remains to be seen.
“It’s a real tragedy,” says Jeremy Gould, author of Coventry: The Making of a Modern City, the definitive book on the city’s postwar development. “The whole thing is an appalling waste of time and money, and entirely misses the point about the city centre’s special qualities. It shows such a lack of imagination – all the ideas seem to be reboiled from the 1980s. We need gentle repair, not wholesale demolition.”
Visiting Coventry today, it can be difficult to fully appreciate the quality of the city architects’ original vision. After decades of neglect and misguided intervention, the part of the town centre in question is in a tatty state and suffers from practical problems with servicing and circulation. It can feel tired and dreary, lacking the visual drama of other now-beloved landmarks of the period, making it a hard sell for those who have yet to be convinced by the subtle charms of postwar planning.
“It hasn’t aged well,” says Labour councillor Jim O’Boyle, Coventry’s cabinet member for regeneration, who is leading the redevelopment plans for the council. “There’s not much architectural merit to a lot of it. You can’t just pick on one bit and say it’s nice and ignore the rest of the concrete monstrosities. That’s nonsense. The point of shopping precincts is not to look the same as when they were first built – they have to be living, breathing things that respond to how the city is evolving. We’re trying to make Coventry fit for the 21st century.”
O’Boyle says the initial plans were for around 70% retail space and 30% housing, but the scheme struggled to find a major anchor tenant, so it’s been rejigged to 70% residential, 30% retail and entertainment. “City centres are now for meeting friends, eating out and having what they call ‘experiences’,” he says. “It’s a very millennial thing. After Covid, I think everyone will want a few experiences. Coventry can be at the vanguard of that.”
Taking inspiration from London’s Covent Garden market, the designs feature a central “pavilion” that will host “a dynamic variety of pop-up retail and leisure providers”. This will be surrounded by bulky blocks of flats, along with a hotel and cinema, with shops and restaurants on the ground floor. But, despite the development benefiting from almost £100m of council funding, not a single one of the 1,300 homes will be classed as affordable. Questions also remain over whether local shopkeepers in the existing precinct will be priced out.
“The scale of the shops along Hertford Street and City Arcade was very well considered,” says Louise Campbell, “not just to experience as a pedestrian shopper, but from a rental perspective too. There’s a very real fear that these businesses won’t be able to afford space in the new blocks.”
It is not the first time that Coventry town centre has been in the council’s sights. In 2009, it unveiled a £1bn plan by Jon Jerde, the Californian guru of themed shopping malls, to flatten the entire centre and replace it with a park-topped mall radiating from an “iconic” egg-shaped library. It reeked of a desperation to keep up with the novelty blobs of Birmingham and inevitably floundered. But it let the bulldozing genie out of the bottle and set a damaging precedent, in that the current proposals seem positively modest in comparison.
“The whole saga feels like watching a slow-motion car crash,” says architectural historian Otto Saumarez Smith, author of Boom Cities, a book about radical urban renewal in 1960s Britain. “The town centre has been subject to a process of attrition, and it takes a bit of imagination to see past the 1990s attempts to pretend it was something else. But the precinct could easily be refurbished and renovated.”
Many suspect the dilapidation is no accident. “What they’ve got is worn out and tacky,” says author Jeremy Gould. “But of course that’s a deliberate ploy. You make something look awful and then you consult: ‘Would you like this brand new glitzy retail centre, or this tacky old thing to remain?’ Of course, the answer is the new one.”
The council has frequently clashed with the heritage lobby over its desire for shiny new baubles. In a 2018 post on his Piledriver blog, Councillor O’Boyle described Historic England as “an unaccountable quango made up of non Coventrians dressed in tweeds and Rupert trousers” who “lay down the law according to Tarquin and his friends at the grouse shooting club”. Around the same time, the council’s only heritage officer left, having opposed some of the steroidal student tower blocks that now hem the city, leaving a void of expertise.
At least 10 of the noted buildings featured in Gould’s 2016 book have since been demolished, and others remain threatened. The listed 1950s architects’ department itself is being engulfed by a big new complex for the university, while the fate of the listed 1960s swimming pool and the elephant-like sports centre is also up in the air, after the construction of the new Wave pool, a metallic blue tornado that swirls clumsily next to a medieval church spire. O’Boyle promises “exciting plans” with a developer are in the works to repurpose both.
As its year as city of culture gets under way, this would be the perfect time for Coventry to show the world how differently regeneration could be done. This ailing 1960s “town of the future” could be repaired and upgraded as a model of mid-century restoration, with civic new uses found for empty shops, not more identikit retail dropped here in the hope tenants will come.
O’Boyle says improvements have already begun in the Upper Precinct, the earlier part of the town centre, where a clunky 1980s escalator has been removed and sight-lines restored. But these small tweaks do little to compensate for the destruction next door.
“There is a real opportunity to showcase Coventry as the international success that it was,” says Saumarez Smith. “There is something about the optimism of that early moment that makes what is happening now even more painful. It is the city to tell the history of postwar British planning and the role of the car. It’s not impossible that it will become a world heritage site.” If it survives the wrecking ball, that is.
