A brief history of Coventry

Birthplace of the Godiva legend and the motor car in Britain, mediaeval walled city and 20th century industrial powerhouse, victim of blitzkrieg and a centre of international peace and reconciliation, Coventry is like no other British city.

Coventry's early beginnings

Coventry was a scattered settlement when Leofric, Earl of Mercia, and his wife Godiva founded a church which was dedicated here in 1043. By the end of the 14th Century Coventry had become the fourth most powerful city in England.

Enormous wealth, from the sale of high quality fleeces from Midlands sheep, had paved the streets and lined them with a startling array of handsome buildings in sandstone and timber frame. Coventry soon became a major centre of pilgrimage. The Benedictines, Carthusians, Carmelites and Franciscans had all established religious houses in the city and Coventry's royal charter of 1345 was the first of its kind in England.

With a two-mile town wall to rival London's, trade guilds whose membership stretched right across Europe and royal patronage in the shape of Coventry-held Parliaments, the city's fortunes seemed secure.

Coventry's changing fortunes

It wasn't until the 16th Century that Coventry's economy fell into crisis marking the beginning of a cycle of boom and slump that has characterised the city's history right up to the present day.

During the Civil War the protection provided by the city's extraordinary wall helped to guard Royalist prisoners – hence the term 'sent to Coventry'. But because of its parliamentary leaning the city fell out of favour with the Stuarts and on his accession to the throne Charles II ordered its town wall and defences to be destroyed.

As the industrial revolution crashed and hammered its way through Britain, creating new cities, Coventry dreamed on, secure in its ancient streets and a staple industry based on ribbon weaving.

But by the mid 1800s when the writer George Eliot came to know the city (Coventry was the model for her most famous novel Middlemarch) it was heading for bad times again.

Riots followed the introduction of mechanised looms into a weaving industry based on traditional skills, and by 1860 only soup kitchens were keeping many weavers and their families from starvation. Watchmaking sprang to the rescue, but within a generation that too was on the decline, fatally undermined by foreign competition.

Coventry's time-honoured ability to pull a new industry out of the hat when it desperately mattered threw up a new saviour in the shape of bicycles. From humble beginnings in the 1860s the city quickly became the home of the cycle industry in Britain, attracting inventive engineers and entrepreneurs by the train-load. By the last decade of the century the bloom was rapidly fading from cycle manufacturing. But then in 1896 the Daimler company began building cars in a disused Coventry cotton mill, and another new industry was born, one that would lay the foundations for the city's extraordinary 20th century expansion.

As cycle manufacturers turned towards the new-fangled 'horseless carriage' the old city was already bulging at the seams, its ancient street pattern and quiet suburbs increasingly under pressure from a tide of immigrants, newcomers like the Whittle family, enticed from bleaker economic climates further north by the distant sound of an engineering boom.

Young Frank Whittle's astonishing journey from Coventry terraced street to a place in history as the inventor of the jet engine was exceptional but by no means unique. An explosion of innovative talent and entrepreneurial dash was putting immense strains on Coventry. It was out-growing itself and something had to give.

The Blitz

As late as 1920 the city was being described as one of the best preserved mediaeval town in Europe, but within a dozen years the ancient streets were beginning to be cleared. Car city could no longer support a mediaeval street pattern and the Luftwaffe merely accelerated what had already begun.

On the 14 November 1940 Coventry was subjected to the single most concentrated attack on a British city in WWII. Lasting 11hours the raid damaged or destroyed 43,000 homes along with the great medieval church of St Michael's – the only British cathedral to be destroyed in WWII.

Coventry in modern times

Between the wars Coventry had been the fastest growing urban centre in Britain and the city that emerged from the rubble was central to the new Labour government's vision of a brave new Britain, with the first pedestrianised shopping centre in Europe and a higher rate of car and home ownership than any other industrial city.

In the fifties they called it Britain's Detroit. Its engineering workers enjoyed the first £5 note in a peacetime blue collar wage packet and immigrants flocked from the far corners of the British Isles and further afield to share in its prosperity.

Its new cathedral, consecrated in 1962 and dedicated to the cause of international peace and reconciliation, seemed to symbolise a prosperous and outward-looking future for a city. But the spiral of history was about to take another cruel twist. When the clouds of the recession, fuelled by an oil crisis, began to gather at the beginning of the 1970s Coventry had neither the diversified industrial base nor the firmly-rooted corporate spirit to blow them away.

Its plight was brutally highlighted at the dawn of the 1980s with the collapse of Alfred Herbert, once the world's biggest machine tool firm. As machinery sales were held in a dead factory where thousands had worked it was clear that once again Coventry was veering towards a slump.

Factory closures, a failure to invest in its once pioneering shopping precincts and increasing unemployment rates gave the city a bleak and dispiriting Ghost Town feel, so articulately voiced by its most famous musical export, The Specials. Its image, once so vibrant and leading edge, coarsened and it began to suffer an accelerating brain-drain as many of the most inventive sought work elsewhere.

Coventry in the 21st Century

Twenty-odd years on, things have changed for the better. Coventry now boasts two universities – The University of Warwick and Coventry University. 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 Arena, the new home of Coventry City Football Club and a major new leisure facility will continue to revitalise and raise the city’s profile immensely, while a £50m joint development by Arrowcroft and Scottish Life to rejuvenate the Lower Precinct is now complete.

In August 2001 the Priory Visitor Centre was opened on the site of Coventry's first cathedral which had been demolished in the 16th Century. The Centre houses objects discovered during archaeological excavations, and has proved very popular with visitors to the city. Nearby is the recently renovated and spectacular stone vaulted Priory Undercroft, originally built as cellars and now open to the public for the first time in 400 years.

Coventry has also embarked on a programme to redevelop its major city centre cultural venues with a new frontage to the Coventry Transport Museum and a huge new development at The Herbert which has a new History Centre, Creative Media and Arts facilities, new galleries and exhibitions, school space, cafes and much much more.

The Belgrade Theatre has also benefited from a recent major development project.