Coventry

This report examines the implementation of the Homelessness Reduction Act 2017 in the West Midlands, particularly in Coventry. It focuses on the new duties contained in the Act and how they are subsequently being applied. The Homelessness Reduction Act is the largest reform to housing legislation in over a decade. This report will critically analyse the effects of the new Act and provide insight into the practical workings of the new duties that it imposed.  Since its implementation on April 2018, the Act has been met with mixed responses from both policy makers and charitable organisations. While there has been concerns raised on a national level about the new Act, there is a lack of knowledge around its implementation at a local level. This report is the first evaluation of the Act since implementation

Social value review of Specified Activity Requirement (SAR) programme, Springboard for female
offenders in Coventry. The overall aim of Springboard has been to provide a female-specific support
service to assist women offenders in addressing their offending behaviour and to build their self esteem and confidence, enabling them to achieve stability and a life free from crime.

The demand of portable water is constantly increasing due to factors such as growing population and changing user behaviour. Global and UK population is projected to increase further in the coming decades, which may lead to increased pressure on the scarce fresh water sources and the infrastructure for managing mains water supply and waste water management. Rain water is freely available resource which can be harvested to reduce the need mains water demand, as well as reduce the pressure on urban drainage infrastructure. Rain Water Harvesting in a wide scale within urban areas have the potential to increase both sustainability and resilience of building and urban environments, by reducing extraction of scarce surface and underground water resources. Higher education sector was responsible for significant carbon emissions and consumption of water resources with high cost and carbon emission. The paper is based on a case study of Coventry University building facilities. The impact of rain water harvesting has been investigated in Coventry University buildings and the potential impact within the surrounding urban environment of Coventry city centre has been discussed. Building inventory survey has been carried out to establish total building footprint for rain water harvesting, the data has been used to calculate total rain water yield from the case study buildings. Results show that Coventry University consumes about 97,000 m3 of water per year while the calculated rain water that can potential be harvested from the buildings is about 24,000 m3, which amounts to about 25% of Coventry University’s total annual water consumption.

This article contributes to existing studies that are concerned with standardisation and supralocalisation processes in the development of written English during the Early Modern English period. By focussing on and comparing civic records and letter data from important regional urban centres, notably Bristol, Coventry and York, from the period 1500–1700, this study provides new insight into the gradual emergence of supralocal forms. More precisely, the linguistic variables under investigation are third person indicative present tense markers (singular and plural). The findings of this study reveal that each urban centre shows a unique distribution pattern in the adoption of supralocal -(V)s singular and plural zero. Furthermore, verb type as well as text type appear to be important language internal and external factors respectively.

BENJAMIN BRITTEN’S OPERAS
DEATH – MARGINALITY – TRANSCENDANCE – LOVE DENIAL

On the basis of the very first steps in that project for Avignon’s University, I submit to discussion the following notes. Britten sounds to me like a spiritual transcending chant and song of death beyond life in the heart of life itself. That love, that life, that transcendence is like the figure of the boy killed in Curlew River or some other operas, since I will only deal with operas, including of course Death in Venice, the perfect sacred garden and cemetery of Benjamin Britten, the graveyard of his belief that life can only be in death, or if you prefer that death can only exist in life.
Here are the operas I will consider after collecting them. Some are ballets, some are vaudevilles, some are operettas, but all are about that strange foreigner who is the only stranger in our life that counts: death, death our friend, death our lover, death our life partner.
Thinking of it now, just at the beginning of this search and hunt, I feel death is the most beautiful experience man can have, and that is not morbid because any “Danse Macabre” is not a simple ordinary dance. It is a trance that leads us to bliss and full mental orgasmic enjoyment.
One of my starting block is La Chaise Dieu’s Danse Macabre and I add to this first lap my review of two books on this Danse Macabre.

Community empowerment and community capacity building have been central to government agendas in Britain over the past decade. Agendas for tackling the so-called ‘War on Terrorism’ and promoting community cohesion have become increasingly significant in addition, especially sincethe bombings in London in 2005. This article focuses upon the current gap between these differing agendas. This is particularly relevant in an era of increasing globalisation, with considerable debate on the impact of migration, and anxieties about previous approaches to multiculturalism that have been the subject of growing criticism.Having set out these gaps in public policy and research in this field, the article examines the evidence from research, including 100 interviews together with focus groups conducted in three localities in England, identifying the problems, in terms of the lack of engagement of ‘new communities’ and interms of the potential tensions within and between communities. There was, however, encouraging evidence that strategies were being developed to develop more inclusive, more democratically accountable and more effective forms of community engagement. The article concludes by summarising potential implications for building community cohesion and social solidarity.

The article attempts to explain the project to rebuild Coventry Cathedral after World War II in the light of the processes of formation of collective memory studied by Sociology, highlighting the conflicting interests of a local community willing to overcome a painful past and a nation interested in using such past to develop a narrative of victimization and resurrection across the country. Moreover it presents the project in Coventry as an example of admonitory monument or Mahnmal, popularized at that time due to the inability to sustain a narrative of war in terms of courage and honor.

The subject of this thesis is the Lollard network which was discovered in the English city of Coventry during the inquisitorial investigations between the years 1486 and 1522. The inquisitorial registers of the bishops John Hales and Geoffrey Blyth, who led the investigations, along with the Lichfield Court Book, are the sources for this thesis. The Lollard network is viewed through the lens of social network analysis. Individual suspects, 161 in total, are viewed as nodes. Every interaction mentioned in the sources, as well as each relationship between the suspects, is viewed as an edge. There are 540 edges in total. These edges, along with the attributes of nodes, especially gender, age, and occupation, are the subject of the analysis of the whole network. Degree centrality, involvement degree, eigencentrality and betweenness centrality are the scales for measuring the importance of individual people, both genders, age classes, and occupations in this network. This project tested statements such as that men, older people and craftsmen are the most important in the Lollard networks or that Lollards were mostly middle to lower class people. These statements are shown to be mostly correct. However, also painters have proven to be unexpectedly important. Moreover, some of the people with high social status are key members of the network as well.

Comparing several immigrant communities in London and Coventry (around 1970), I tried, in this article, to define more closely the nature of ethnic boundaries in a situation where the encompassed immigrant communities had to adapt to conditions largely defined by the encompassing British society, taking into account how the immagrants' community values influenced the adaptation.

The think tank Centre for Cities released a new report Cities Outlook 2015 which charts the performance of city economies over the last ten years. Coventry performed well in many indicators including patents and private sector jobs growth, but less positively in the proportion of the population with no formal qualifications and public sector jobs. This Working Brief highlights the position of Coventry and includes a comparison to Birmingham in order to consider the progress and position of two key cities in the West Midlands.