Contesting the modern city:

reconstruction and everyday life

in post-war Coventry

Submitted to Planning Perspectives

PHIL HUBBARD and LUCY FAIRE

Department of Geography,

Loughborough University,

Loughborough, UK. LE11 3TU

Tel. 01509 222747

Email: P.J.Hubbard@lboro.ac.uk

and KEITH LILLEY

School of Geography
Queen’s University Belfast

Belfast

Northern Ireland. BT7 1NN

Tel. 028 9027 3363

Email: k.lilley@qub.ac.uk

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 Contesting the modern city:

reconstruction and everyday life

in post-war Coventry

Abstract: Recently, views have begun to shift on whether the immediate

post-war period in Britain really was characterised by a consensus of public

opinion in favour of comprehensive redevelopment planning. This paper

explores this issue in the context of Coventry, a city that was extensively

bombed during World War II, but redeveloped according to Modernist-

inspired planning principles in the post-war years, resulting in an urban

landscape celebrating the perceived virtues of speed, efficiency and order.

Examining the reconstruction of Coventry’s city centre in the 1940s and

1950s, this paper suggests that the popular consensus in favour of its

comprehensive redevelopment was in fact more illusory than real. To these

ends, the paper brings into dialogue people’s memories of living in

Coventry in this era with existing published and unpublished accounts of

the city’s redevelopment. This exposes contradictions and conflicts between

the planners’ vision of the future city and the appropriation and use of the

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 resulting urban landscape by the city’s inhabitants. The paper accordingly

concludes that processes of modernisation provoke constant contradictions

between representation and experience, and suggests that it is by exploring

these contradictions that we might develop fuller, richer and more

contextual planning histories.

Introduction

In many accounts of British town and country planning, the mid-twentieth century is

recalled as a pivotal period in planning’s transition from being a somewhat marginal

pressure group to becoming part of the state’s bureaucratic machine. [1] The reasons for

this governmental acceptance of the need for planning have been widely debated, and

although some have highlighted the influence of key planning consultants such as

Patrick Abercrombie and Thomas Sharp, it is the Second World War that is often seen as

the main catalyst. Indeed, with key individuals and groups (notably, the TCPA, RTPI

and RIBA) arguing that urban planning was vital if the rebuilding of war-torn urban

fabric was to result in a ‘Better Britain’, it has been suggested that there was widespread

enthusiasm for planned redevelopment. The idea that a greater good might result from

wartime destruction thus bequeathed a social consensus in favour of planning that,

according to some scholarly commentators writing on this period of planning history,

involved all social classes (and political parties). [2]

This interpretation of planning’s ascendancy into the heart of British government

and the new orthodoxy of the welfare state tallies with a more general interpretation of

3
the post-war years as ones gripped by enthusiasm for all things ‘Modern’. [3] Although

some historians have now begun to question the idea that there really was such a ‘mass

consensus’, a view still persists that with the post-war period Britain entered a new era

of improvement, with existing social arrangements being dismantled as discourses

emphasising the desirability of order, cleanliness, speed and efficiency came to the fore.

[4] The reconstruction and planned comprehensive redevelopment of post-war British

cities offers a specific and focused instance of such modernisation, albeit with a

complexity that is only now being recognised and addressed. [5] Indeed, much of what

has been written of this move towards the rebuilding and modernisation of British cities

continues to tell the story from the politician’s or planner’s point of view. [6] In a related

paper we have outlined some of the dangers implicit in writing planning histories

relying solely on such sources: specifically, we stressed that accounts that describe the

city through the ‘planner’s eye gaze’ offer a distanced view divorced from the realities

and complexities of everyday life in the city. [7] Putting it bluntly, Miles argues that

official sources inevitably write the city from the point of view of an authoritative,

privileged male. [8] He argues this ‘view from above’ unifies disparate elements of

urban form, reducing ‘human participants in its spectacle to a role equivalent to the

figures in an architectural model.’ [9] Repressing the agency of those who live and

experience the city at ‘street level’, the implicit danger here is that we get a distorted

and inaccurate record of a city’s redevelopment: a story told ‘by intellectuals and for

intellectuals’ that ignores the complex ways ‘ordinary’ citizens engage with, and change

the city in the realms of everyday life. As the geographer Nigel Thrift contends, the

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result of such writing strategies is that we perpetuate ‘a particular form of urban theory

which sees the city as the stamp of great and unified forces which it is the task of the

theorist to delineate and delimit’ [10] In his view, this creates distinctly modern accounts

of modern cities, and dispels the ‘magical’ elements of urban life, including the

extraordinary capacity for urban dwellers to change the city through everyday practice.

In this paper, we suggest that such tendencies are clearly etched in accounts of the

Coventry’s post-war rebuilding. Along with other notable British examples of post-war

reconstruction (e.g. Hull, Plymouth, Exeter and Bristol), Coventry’s redevelopment has

been described as summing up the spirit of post-war town planning, capturing the

imagination of many planning historians in the process. [11] Yet in most retrospective

accounts, the story of Coventry’s redevelopment has been re-assembled from published

plans, policy documents, media reports and (rarely) the unpublished memoirs of those

centrally involved in the planning process. [12] In the remainder of this paper we seek

to offer an alternative to existing versions of Coventry’s redevelopment by bringing the

view ‘from below’ into dialogue with the planner’s ‘view from above’. Here, we trace

the latter through a range of published and unpublished sources, some previously

consulted, but many not. These help us briefly describe the evolution of plans for the

redevelopment of Coventry’s city centre, and detail the implementation of the plans

through the 1940s and 1950s. In contrast, we then draw on a series of oral history

interviews with surviving residents to elucidate citizen’s experiences of the

redevelopment of Coventry. The use of oral history methods has, to date, been

relatively under-employed in planning history, exceptions including Gold’s interviews

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with leading figures in post-war planning practice and Voldman’s analysis of post-war

planning based on ‘reconstructor’s tales’ provided by architects and decision-makers in

the French Ministry for Reconstruction and Town Planning. [13] Hence, in our

conclusion, we contrast the use of these two sources - and the different stories of

redevelopment they produce – suggesting that planning history involves a dialectic

between representation and experience that can only be captured by the use of multiple

methods.

Plans for the future city: Coventry as conceived

Targeted by the Luftwaffe in November 1940 because of its strategic importance as a

centre of engineering and automobile manufacture, as well as its important medieval

architecture, Coventry was subject to some of the worst destruction of built fabric to

befall any British city in the Second World War (the term ‘Coventrate’ being adopted by

the Germans to describe other instances of mass destruction). Yet the purported

resilience of Coventrians was held up as symptomatic of the unbreakable spirit of the

British people, and the later emergence of the new Coventry – the ‘phoenix from the

ashes’ – became an important symbol of the determination to build a better Britain. [14]

While progress in the post-war years was initially slow, the city being hampered by

post-war shortages of materials and labour, the transformation of the city centre by the

time of the consecration of the new Coventry cathedral in 1961 was remarkable: a pre-

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war city, still with many historic buildings and street layouts inherited largely from the

Middle Ages, of ‘narrow roads, chaotically placed; an irrational mixture of shopping,

industrial and residential areas, the absence of large, green spaces which would give the

city a chance to breathe; large slum areas; and the ugly and depressing pompous foolery

of architecture’, [15] had been transformed by the late-1950s into ‘a great national

showpiece’, [16] known ‘internationally for the imagination and enterprise which has

marked the rebuilding of its central area.’ [17]

Coventry’s changing plans

While the city’s architect, Donald Gibson, is widely-identified as the key influence on

the shaping of post-war Coventry there were in fact several planning and

redevelopment schemes put forward by him and his colleagues for the post-war

rebuilding of the city, the earliest dating back to the creation of the municipal Architect’s

Department itself, in 1938. [18] The pressing need for redeveloping the city centre was at

that time already evident: Coventry was booming on the back of the motor industry,

and the suburban built-up area of the city had expanded dramatically during the 1930s,

leading to growing problems of traffic congestion and urban blight in the commercial

core. A 1936 editorial in the local newspaper put it bluntly: ‘generations of bad planning

- slums, narrow streets, overcrowding, sewers…must be tackled.’ [19] The creation of

the Architect’s Department under Donald Gibson indicated the intention of the new

Labour city council to tackle these deficiencies and pave the way for planned

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redevelopment. This was the first Local Authority architect’s department in Britain, its

eight trained staff including several young architects who went on to enjoy notable

success elsewhere (including Percy Johnson-Marshall, a pivotal figure in the GLC

housing programme of the 1950s). But disputes between the Architect’s Department

and the City Engineers (headed by Ernest Ford) meant that the former department was

restricted to the design of individual buildings and street furniture, with street layout

deemed a matter for the engineers.

Through 1940 Gibson’s department sketched out new plans for the city, working

largely in their own time to do so. [20] Seeking to generate local enthusiasm for their

ideas, the department mounted a publicity campaign in the city, culminating in the

week-long Coventry of Tomorrow exhibition in May 1940. [21] The fact that the title aped

Le Corbusier’s controversial (1922) City of Tomorrow provided a clear signal that

European Modernism was a key influence, and these plans certainly adopted many of

the precepts associated with the clean-sweep approach that Le Corbusier promoted

when he spoke of ‘the need for the builder to bring in order…for all around him, the

forest is in disorder with its creepers, its briars and the tree-trunks which impede him

and paralyse his efforts.’ [22] Le Corbusier’s conception of the traditional streets of

European cities as ‘wild nature’ needing to be cleared was clearly highly polemic, and

based on a particular conception of culture/nature, but alongside the work of other

CIAM figures such as Sert, Giedion and Moser, not to mention Gropius, Wagner and

Taut, the idea of eradicating visual clutter through a clean-sweep approach was clearly

inspirational to Gibson and his team. Indeed, Johnson-Marshall later recalled how,

8
when his city-centre flat was hit by a bomb, he had managed to escape and at the same

time salvage his copy of the MARS plan of London that had been pinned to the wall:

this was the Le Corbusier-inspired plan prepared by Aileen and William Tatton Brown

in 1937, based around clearly delineated neighbourhood units distributed along high-

speed road arteries. [23]

The aerial bombardments of November 1940 and April 1941 in fact destroyed

much of the existing city centre (including 702,600 square foot of rateable retail and

business uses), as well as damaging two thirds of the city’s housing stock. [24] Amid

scenes of some panic (and the near introduction of martial law as looting became

endemic), [25] the initial concern was with public order, but once this was restored, the

need to redevelop ‘boldly and comprehensively’ emerged as a new mantra for the city

council. [26] Publicly encouraged by Lord Reith, [27] then Minster for Public Works, the

Town Clerk commissioned Gibson and Ford to work on a redevelopment plan for the

square mile of the central city but they were unable to agree on several points. [28] Two

plans were therefore submitted, but Gibson’s prevailed, retaining many of the features

of the plans that had been exhibited by the Architect’s Department in 1940. Early in

1941, Gibson’s Plan for the New Coventry appeared in the form of a pamphlet reprinted

from an article published previously in Architect and Building News. [29] Subtitled

Disorder and Destruction: Order and Design, this plan counter-posed perspective

elevations of the ‘new Coventry’ with an aerial photograph of the pre-war city, stressing

to readers that ‘this must not happen again’. [30] As Gibson put it:

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 How are we to build when so much is to be destroyed? Can we afford to cease

work for a creative end, even though we are at war? If we do not, the open gate

of defeat lies ahead, and behind it the declining path of civilisation and

decadence. [31]

The most obvious characteristic of this plan was a disregard for property ownership so

that ‘the various units which contribute the life of Coventry have been grouped

together.’ [32] These units were to include ‘a shopping centre envisaged as two main

blocks flanking a shopping avenue from which only pedestrians would have access to

recessed arcades’, and a recreation centre where ‘cinemas and theatres would take their

place in and contribute to the design as a whole.’ The plan also placed a premium on

motor transport and parking, tentatively suggesting a system of radial and ring roads

intended to enable the decongestion of the city centre, and so that ‘through traffic would

remain unhampered by local traffic’ (see Figure One). [33] Gibson summarised the plan

as a design of ‘wide thoroughfares and good vistas’: subsequent accounts have argued

that its circulatory traffic system and wide pedestrian precincts were to inspire similar

redevelopment schemes the length and breadth of the nation. [34]

Although Gibson and his team of architects did their utmost to persuade the

public, as well as councillors, of the merits of a clean-sweep approach, it is clear that not

all shared this vision, with concerns raised by both insiders (notably, Ernest Ford) and

outsiders (including William Holford, who was concerned about the practicalities of

Gibson’s scheme). This was echoed in several letters to local newspapers, which, while

10
supportive of the principle of re-development, queried spending £40,000,000 on the

redevelopment. [35] Hence, while the plan was adopted by the city’s Reconstruction

Committee in February 1941, Gibson was mindful that many were ‘rather sore at the

Council for adopting the Architect’s plan.’ [36] The remaining war years therefore

witnessed Gibson appeasing opponents of this radical urban vision by tempering the

excesses of his scheme (to the extent that he took on board many of Ford’s suggestions).

At the same time, he continued to try to enthuse Coventrians of the necessity of

comprehensive redevelopment. Such efforts included the construction of a new model

publicising the plans, and the occasional publication of artists’ impressions of the new

city. Such impressions included scenographic perspectives and elevation sketches

drawn by members of Gibson’s team. One of them, Johnson-Marshall, was to recall

subsequently that although some of his ‘rough sketches’ of ‘new skylines’ appeared in

these published plans, he had in fact ‘drawn them on a wall’ in his office only ‘to

illustrate some of the principles of the scheme to visitors’, and had not intended them to

be used for publication. [37] Others enjoyed a more limited circulation, such as the

artists’ impression of the new Coventry emerging from the old, which was used by

Ernest Ford as a Christmas card in December 1946 (Figure Two).

Here, we should note the diversity of ideas that existed about architectural style,

even after the plan had been adopted. In Gibson’s words, ‘whether the buildings are

eventually in Gothic revival or modern styles as far as elevational treatment is

concerned has nothing to do with the primary consideration – that the plan is the thing

at this stage.’ [38] All of this suggests that Gibson in particular was largely unconcerned

11
about architectural style, being more preoccupied with the general layout and coherence

of the streetscape. In fact, Gibson seemed to be remarkably ambivalent about modern

architectural design, believing that ‘well-designed, proportioned Modern buildings can

still be as dull as ditchwater.’ [39] Hence, as the redevelopment of Coventry unfolded,

hampered by inquests, appeals and disagreements between architects and engineers,

Gibson seemed less and less concerned by the appearance of individual buildings, and

more concerned with attempts to enliven the townscape with ‘special and interesting

things’. [40] In many ways, Gibson’s attitude reveals apparent tensions at the heart of

British Modernism; with the ‘no-frills’ International style being perceived by Gibson – a

self-proclaimed Modernist - as dull and repetitive. Here then we see the influence of the

Liverpool Beaux Arts approach to civic design – later refined by Holford, Sharp and

Cullen – which was little enamoured with ‘toothpaste architecture’ but concerned with

vistas, points of interest and the ‘art of civic design.’ [41] Examining the Coventry plans

in more detail, one can thus discern the premium Gibson and his team placed on the

enhancement of circulation and the creation of a visually stimulating – and coherent –

cityscape. This then was to be a city for ‘a healthy body, a cultured mind and a radiant

soul.’ [42]

Publicising the plans

Given these changing ideas about architectural style, it is unsurprising that the

proposed treatment of buildings changed subtly from the official opening of Broadgate

12
House in 1951 through to the completion of the precincts in the late 1950s (by which

time Gibson had retired, replaced by Arthur Ling). [43] But even though the plan

evolved through various iterations it is clear that it remained underpinned by a number

of key planning precepts: firstly, the segregation of pedestrians and motorised traffic,

enabled by the construction of a circulatory ring-road and the introduction of

pedestrianised precincts; secondly, the replacement of an irregular streetscape with

orthogonal and ordered civic vistas, and, third, the dedication of specific spaces to

shopping, education, industry and recreational land-use.

Irrespective of his ambivalence about architectural styles, Gibson thus continued

to argue for adherence to these precepts, and the Architect’s Department continued to

actively publicise their plans. This publicity drive was to culminate in the organisation

of the ‘Coventry of the Future’ exhibition in 1945. Once the decision had been made to

hold an exhibition to celebrate six hundred years of the city’s Charter of Incorporation,

and the theme of the city’s redevelopment had been identified as a possible focus, the

Town Clerk asked Gibson and Ford to design the exhibition layout, procure exhibits

such as models and perspectives, and produce a booklet to accompany the exhibition.

[44] Attempts were made to publicise the exhibition by having announcements made

from a ‘loudspeaker van’ and copies of the exhibition guide sent to various newspapers

and journals. Additionally, the council co-sponsored a competition, together with the

local newspaper, the Coventry Evening Telegraph, ‘to ascertain views of Coventry people

as to general improvements’. [45] As well as the newspaper’s competition

announcement, a display at the exit to the exhibition informed visitors that they could

13
win 50 guineas by submitting an essay on the theme of ‘how would you rebuild your

city?’ and a further 50 guineas for submitting ‘six ideas’ for the Coventry of the future.

[46] In this display there was also an invitation to send comments to the council about

the proposals on show, as well as a bookstall from which visitors could purchase, for

two shillings and six-pence, copies of the booklet, The Future Coventry, ‘written to

interest the man in the street’, which included extracts from the exhibition and

reproductions of some of the perspectives and illustrations produced by Gibson’s team.

[47]

The staging of the exhibition (over a two-week period in October 1945) thus came

to be seen not simply as a means of informing the public as to the plans, but

encouraging active participation. The fact there were 48,808 visitors over the thirteen-

day period of the exhibition, and on one day alone 7,100, [48] might suggest these

efforts were rewarded, and that ‘reconstruction enthusiasms had reached new levels’.

[49] Yet to interpret attendance figures as symptomatic of enthusiasm for the new plans

seems dangerous if one considers two of the letters sent to the local newspaper

following the exhibition:

One feels that Coventry people should be highly appreciative of the efforts that

are being made by our local young architects to create some visions of a more

beautiful Coventry of the future…Will they please add to my own appreciation

of their enthusiasm by giving some public assurance that their apparent designs

upon the Cathedral Close are intended merely as a joke? Their model showing a

14
 civic centre grouped around the Cathedral suggests vaguely a series of tunnels

from the Maginot Line that have unaccountably surfaced. This type of

surrealism in architecture may have it merits – but not in the Cathedral Close.

[50]

Along with a party of others, I visited the Coventry of the Future exhibition. The

general feeling was that the hard rigid lines of those monotonous buildings

would utterly spoil Coventry’s unique city centre, with its fine old buildings and

churches, etc. The treatment seems to us entirely foreign and out of touch with

the traditional setting – which demands real harmony in its surroundings. [51]

Clearly, not all visitors were seduced by the models and visual impressions that formed

the basis of the exhibition. Indeed, other letters hint at concerns about the juxtaposition

of old and new Coventry, while some focused on the details which the planners seemed

to have got wrong: one ‘housewife’ lamented the planners’ recommendation that

aluminium sinks were fitted in the kitchens of new houses, claiming they were quite

unsuited to Coventry’s hard water. [52] Yet others ignored the detail of the plan to

again question whether the ends justified the means:

We are shown wonderful buildings, open spaces, wide roads but nowhere is

their cost indicated. To achieve these things, many useful buildings would have

to be reduced to rubble, at somebody’s expense, and the new will not arise at the

15
 waving of wand but by the pouring out of our fast-diminishing wealth and the

use of labour which now seems non-existent. [53]

Of course, it needs to be acknowledged there were letters in support of the scheme, and

the lack of critical complaints (or entries in the ‘Coventry of the Future’ competition)

suggests that at least some were in favour of what was to be done. But the diversity of

opinion that existed should make us wary of uncritically accepting the idea of a social

consensus in favour of the Gibson plan. Despite Gibson’s intention of making a plan ‘of

simple and direct appeal to the people of Coventry’, [54] it is clear that the plans for the

new city were still intent on ordering the variety and character of the city according to

the planner-architects’ perspective. In short, it did not, and could not, met the

aspirations of all Coventrians.

Coventry’s plans in perspective

As we have stressed, our (re-)examination of the modernisation of Coventry in the post-

war years is prompted by a concern that accounts based mainly on the content of

published plans and documents offer only a partial account of urban change. Stressing

both the desirability and necessity of mass reconstruction, these images and documents

juxtaposed the deficiencies of the pre-war city (e.g. physical congestion, moral pollution

and visual disorder) with the promise of an aesthetically-appealing and ordered

16
‘Modern’ townscape. In Coventry’s case, land-use maps provided a seemingly rational

allocation of land-uses, while remarkable new horizontal or vertical perspectives were

used to emphasise the striking nature of the proposed townscape (see Figure Three).

Plans for the future Coventry were certainly highly idealised, emphasising

spaciousness, speed and cleanliness by effacing many of the complexities and

ambiguities of traditional street life. Likewise, contemporary media coverage replicated

this ordered view of the urban landscape, stressing ‘old familiar landmarks will

disappear…Just as a tree is pruned and trained in order to put forth new limbs, so must

the development of a city be planned.’ [55] But while these words and images may

have been interpreted at the time as objective representations based on rational

‘scientific’ procedures, post-structural ideas lead us to the inescapable conclusion that

they were attempts to impose a particular spatial and moral order on the city. For

example, Michel Foucault wrote of the importance of legible, ordered space in the

making of Modern subjectivity, with his close attention to the panoptic regimes that

underpin spatial forms alerting to the role of maps, plans and ledgers as exercises of

power/knowledge. [56] Likewise, Henri Lefebvre’s work on the production of urban

space in capitalist society has suggested that those who design space have a particular

way of seeing ‘from on high and afar’ (i.e. the ‘view from above’). Indeed, the key

notion in Lefebvre’s work is that the traditionally-conceived dialectic of society and

space needs to be reconceptualised as a constantly negotiated relationship between

different types of space – namely conceptualised and lived. [57] Here, Lefebvre

identified the active work that plans, maps and documents perform in ordering people’s

17
everyday lives, contrasting the ‘cold’, detached plans produced by planners and

urbanists with the spontaneous (and ‘warm’) nature of much street life. Lefebvre

accordingly outlined the importance of representations of space in seeking to imposing

a (capitalist) spatial order on the rhythms and rituals of everyday life in the city,

showing that in the twentieth century at least, representations of space tend to create an

abstract capitalist spatiality as opposed to the ‘feudal’ spatiality of medieval society).

[58]

Lefebvre’s assertion that the plans deployed by architects and planners over-code

‘spaces of everyday practice’ resonates with Michel de Certeau’s discussion of the

strategies (of power) that constitute a mode of administration. In his words, these

strategies are those practices of ordering that repress ‘all the physical, mental and

political pollutants.’ [59] De Certeau argues that this is mirrored in the tendency for

architect-planners to render invisible those things they regard as ‘out of place’ in the city

as conceived of from their ‘rational’, phallocentric, Cartesian perspective. This ‘planner’s

eye view’ exemplifies the discursively-constructed ‘representations of space’ that

Lefebvre contended are crucial in ensuring the domination of capitalist space (based on

exchange values) over fully lived, spontaneous and creative space (based on use values).

In the light of the arguments of Foucault, Lefebvre, de Certeau and other post-

structuralist theorists (and here we could also list a number of feminist writers who

expose the phallocentrism of planning discourse), we thus argue that writing the city

from published plans and documents emphasises certain facets of urban life, but

represses others. As such, we suggest such sources reveal little of the change that was

18
occurring at ground level, where new practices of everyday life resulted in the apparent

rejection of some of the planner’s ideas, and enthusiastic acceptance of others.

Theorising any project of modernisation as essentially heterogeneous and

ambivalent, [60] we accordingly argue that it is important to widen the range of sources

that we consult when trying to re-assemble planning histories. In the remainder of this

paper we elaborate this argument by highlighting the spatial practices played out in the

post-war redevelopment of Coventry city centre between the blitz of 1940 and the

symbolically important consecration of the new cathedral in 1961. Exploring the way

that individuals engaged with the planned city retrospectively is clearly fraught with

difficulties. For example, in Holsten’s anthropological critique of Brasilia (published in

1991), contemporary ethnographic observations are taken as evidence of the failure of

the city inhabitants to adapt to the new precepts of urban space design. [61] Looking

back to post-war reconstruction, however, it is difficult to relate current social and

spatial experiences to those that would have been evident in the 1940s and 1950s. This

means that we are seemingly reliant on published sources that convey something of the

experiences of living in the planned city. For example, Nick Fyfe has used poems to

explore the contestation of the Clyde Valley plan in the 1950s, suggesting poetic visions

of Glasgow offered a ‘thick interpretation’ of the modern city, richly complex and

contradictory. [62] In other studies, autobiography, written testimonies and letters to

local newspapers have been studied to reveal something of the experience of living

through urban change. [63] In contrast, oral history methods are relatively under-

employed in planning history, and where they are used the voices heard tend to belong

19
to planners and architects rather than local people. [64] In the remainder of this paper,

however, we will draw on oral history interviews to explore the lived experience of the

city’s development and the way that the idealised representations of planners engaged

with, conflicted with and reaffirmed the textured spaces of everyday life. Indeed, our

interviews with surviving residents suggest that attempts to re-order space according to

Modern precepts were not universally successful, and that from the start, Coventry’s

citizens often defied the planners’ attempts to order certain aspects of city life.

Living the future: Coventry as experienced

To explore how local people engaged with the plans for Coventry’s redevelopment,

forty-five semi-structured interviews (averaging ninety-minutes) were conducted

during 2001 with residents who had lived or worked in Coventry between 1940 and

1961. [65] These interviewees were recruited through an appeal on local radio, articles in

two local newspapers and through a poster-display in the city’s central library. The

eldest of those who answered our call for respondents was 89, the youngest 55, with all

but one still living in Coventry. Though this does not necessarily constitute a

representative sample of those who lived and worked in the city during the years of

reconstruction (i.e. they were mainly in their 20s and 30s in the 1950s), the range of

backgrounds from which our respondents were recruited gave us little reasons to

suspect we had a sample biased towards any one socio-economic faction. Likewise, the

20
range of addresses at which respondents were interviewed showed no particular bias to

any area of the city. The interviews explored general issues concerning an individual’s

feelings about the 1940s and 1950s redevelopment of Coventry, though this was

deliberately approached tangentially through getting respondents to talk of their

everyday activities of the time. All interviews were taped and transcribed, with

participants giving permission for their interviews to be cited and to be archived for

future reference. [66]

People’s engagement with the plans for reconstruction

Themes emerging from our oral history interviews cover a wide range of issues from

shopping, amenity and recreation through to traffic, litter and public art. In relation to

this paper, however, it is particularly interesting to highlight the diversity of opinions

that people expressed about the principles of comprehensive redevelopment. The

majority of the respondents suggested that they had not objected to the rebuilding of

Coventry, but were in fact profoundly ambivalent about the process of redevelopment.

For many, this ambivalence was tempered by the fact that they had more important

priorities in the post-war years:

Whatever they proposed to do in the rebuilding, you sort of went along with it

in as sort of zombie-like fashion, at least I did. ‘Cause you see I had got things

21
 happening in my own life with my husband getting wounded and being

brought to Bromsgrove Hospital and me going over there to see him and all that

kind of stuff. [67]

Those who were younger at the time of reconstruction suggested that they were

perhaps even less worried about redevelopment than those who had grown up in pre-

war Coventry:

Well, you used to think about it. But, I don’t think that when you’re that young

you read the papers as much as what you do when you’re older, if you see what

I mean. My Mum and Dad used to discuss it, I know. I don’t think when you’re

that age you’re that interested, are you really? [68]

Against this, one of our respondents, who visited the Coventry of the Future exhibition

in 1945, recalled being quite ‘fascinated’ by a model for the new city because they

seemed so futuristic:

It showed the raised ring road, all where the Cathedral was and all the

rest of it. And we thought that this was fascinating…we were all into

spaceships, you know…Buck Rogers and so forth. But we thought that

this looked great, you know, with the ring road round the top, and the

22
 buildings underneath it and inside and all the rest of it. We thought this

was quite something! [69]

Yet it is significant that some of those who also recalled seeing models of the proposed

redevelopment were less enthusiastic, and had some difficulty in relating to this

‘planner’s eye view’. One former council employee remembered seeing it in the Council

House:

They had a proper one [model], in the Architect’s Department. It was a proper

model really. You were sort of looking down, you know, like an aerial view. But

they were all buildings, it wasn’t a picture it was models, you know. We went

and had a look at that. You couldn’t sort of visualise it really. [70]

It seems, then, that it was difficult for some people to empathise with the new plans.

The plans they saw represented the city from a ‘planner’s eye view’ and this made it

difficult for them to relate what was being presented to their own, individual views of

the city. There were also a minority who recalled actively disliking the plans for the

reconstruction of Coventry. They explained they disliked it because it was ‘modern’,

‘square’ and ‘uninteresting’, and did not consent to modernist precepts of planning: as

one respondent put it, ‘I liked the black and white buildings of the old Coventry and

then they were going to build this – it just looked like a square thing. Just a square – I

wasn’t awfully impressed with it at all.’ [71]

23
 Far from having unanimous public support for Gibson’s vision of the future city,

some Coventrians considered the plans for the city to be quite unsuitable. As we have

suggested, hints at this lack of consensus appears in newspaper letters and reports of

the time (for example, Lord Iliffe, just two weeks after the opening of Broadgate House

in 1951, was reported as having major reservations about ‘severe box-like buildings’).

[72] Our oral history interviews confirm that it is meaningless to talk of a public

consensus in favour of a particular style or mode of redevelopment. Indeed, the

interviews suggest contradictions existed between the way that the planners’ intended

the new city centre to function and the way it was used and appropriated by

Coventrians in the post-war years. Here, a single example will suffice to demonstrate

this: the way that the new pedestrianised precinct, completed in the 1950s, was

experienced by shoppers and city centre users.

Using Coventry’s pedestrian precinct

The central importance Gibson had placed on having a traffic-free shopping precinct at

the heart of the new Coventry is demonstrated clearly by its continued presence in the

rebuilding plans produced through the 1940s and 1950s (see above). In 1948, as work

was beginning on the building of the cross-shaped precinct (see Figure Four), the

advantages of the new city-centre pedestrian shopping precinct were set out by the city

council thus:

24
 The Precinct, a broad pedestrian way with shops on either side, will provide

departmental stores, shops, showrooms, restaurants and offices on ground floor

and first floor levels, the latter being reached by means of external staircases and

lifts inside the buildings. Arcades and canopies will protect the shopper from the

weather and changes in level will be overcome by ramps which will offer no

difficulty to the mother with her pram. In the centre of the Precinct a sunken

garden will provide a play space where children may be left in safety. The

building will be of brick and stone, and bright sunblinds and painted doorways

will add colour to the scene. [73]

The intention was to concentrate the city’s shops in one part of the central area, cutting

down the time and effort taken to get between them. Moreover, by locating shops in the

same area, it was anticipated they could be made accessible to pedestrians only,

separating shoppers from the dangers of vehicular traffic.

Several respondents certainly felt the pedestrianisation of the precincts and the

zoning of shops was a good idea because it did indeed make their shopping expeditions

easier:

Well, I think the whole thing about it was that you could walk in it, and

you could shop in it and it was so easy to get from one part to another.

25
 There was pretty much everything there that you could want, really. Just

a really brilliant idea. [74]

Some respondents also stressed that pedestrianised precincts made taking small

children into town less stressful. This was something generally remembered by

the female respondents who, given the dominant gender roles of the period,

were more likely to take the children into town with them on their own:

There were no trees in the precincts, I remember, but also no cars, you

didn’t see the cars so you were able to walk freely about and, of course,

later on when I got my own children, it was always easy to take the

children in town because you never used to have to worry about the cars.

[75]

Not everyone found the traffic-free precincts convenient, however. One person

explained her mother found the distances from the bus routes ‘too much’, [76]

suggesting that for many (older) bus and car users the lack of vehicular access was a

problem.

An integral (and innovative) part of the precinct’s design was the provision of

roof-top car parks. In 1950, the local newspaper explained the planner’s intentions

behind the roof-top car parks before they were built:

26
 A point has been made of convenience for motorists. It will be possible, for

example, to enter a car park from one side of the city centre and to continue

through, if it should be full, to another. There should rarely be need to pull out

of a park and go in search of another. [77]

The appeal of the car parks was that their staircases went straight into the Precinct,

making the shops easily accessible by car and reducing the time-taken to get to the

shops. This seemed to work in practice: one female respondent recalled ‘when we were

feeding our family, we just would come into town, park there and go and do our

shopping and get home as quickly as we could’. [78] One of our male interviews agreed:

The Precinct to me was always – “let’s go, buy what we want and go

home.” I think the only advantage it’s ever had from the time it was

built, was the parking, where you could actually park on the roof, go

down some stairs, and there’s the shops, buy it, back up to the car, throw

it in the boot and go home. Amongst my family and amongst my

contemporaries, I think there’s a generally held feeling that the Precinct is

just a bleak, unstylish, jerry-built, shopping area to go, shop, and get

away! [79]

In this case, the aspirations of the planners to save consumers’ time was successful, but

certainly not for the reasons they intended. Moreover, others clearly mourned the loss of

27
on-street parking: one recalled that before the war, he was easily able to park his bike

outside the tailors, buy a shirt and cycle home, whereas the same journey after the war

became a ‘major expedition’ (with local police ready to warn off those who might

attempt cycling through the precincts). [80] This reminds us that planning can never

increase the speed of the city in all respects: acceleration is, after all, necessarily

accompanied by a relative deceleration. [81]

It is evident, then, that while the segregation of people and traffic, and the

associated segregation of local and through traffic, was designed to speed up the city,

some perceived the new Coventry as less efficient and even slower than the pre-war city.

One resident of south Coventry recalled his annoyance that the pedestrianisation of the

shopping centre:

I was never truly engrossed by the pedestrianisation of Hertford Street because

that was always one of the main thoroughfares from Trinity Street, through

Broadgate, out towards the Warwick Road [north-south]. And suddenly it was

closed and pedestrianised and everything went up High Street - which was a

very, very narrow street - and you’d got double-decker buses trying to pass…

there wasn't really room for double-decker buses to pass up the remains of a

medieval street, basically. So the philosophy of closing Hertford Street was

possibly ill-advised. [82]

28
However, the same respondent claimed that the precincts themselves generated a

feeling ‘of freedom to walk and wander’. For others, the precincts evoked rather

different emotions:

As I was growing up I disliked the precinct. I couldn’t accept it…I didn’t like this

vast distance from one wall to the other. And it wasn’t because I had to walk so

far across to get from one shop to the other, it just didn’t have any character. I

thought it was so bland, it was so plain and ordinary and there was nothing – I

mean they kept putting little flower plots and raised beds and you had say, well,

why? Well it was only to break up the concrete. It was a concrete city centre. [83]

The fact that respondents had mixed feelings about the success of separating traffic from

pedestrians underlines that the new plans imposed a particular hierarchy of flows in

particular spaces, and that this hierarchy did not tally with everyone’s notions of what

was appropriate. Nor, evidentially, did the shops in the new precincts meet with

everyone’s approval, with several of our respondents claiming that much of the variety

of pre-war Coventry had been lost as smaller retailers were displaced from the precincts

by larger department stores and national multiples (a view echoed in one letter to the

local newspaper in 1955, which stated ‘we are sorry to see, however, that instead of the

large variety of shops we had hoped for, there seem to be so many of a similar type and

standard’). [84]

29
 A further illustration of the tensions between planners’ and Coventrian’s visions

of the use of city was apparent in debates surrounding the design of precincts with

upper and lower levels, linked by stairs. The difficulties in getting upstairs for people

with young children were noted by Lady Pakenham, wife of Minister of Civil Aviation

in the Labour Government, who visited Coventry in November 1955 and described the

precinct as ‘gay’ but wondered how women got to the second storey with a pram.

Although the precinct had been intended to incorporate access ramps, these were

ultimately not built as ‘it would have spoilt the Precinct, because such a long ramp

would have been necessary.’ [85] The fact the upper levels of the precincts were only

accessible by stairs appeared an inconvenience to many, not just those who were

responsible for young infants:

The precinct shops on top floor… hardly did any business. As quick as

they opened…they tended to change or close. So, I don’t think Coventry

people were too keen on climbing up steps and going to shops at

different levels. I think everybody had got so used to being on the

ground floor. So they didn’t do very well at all. [86]

At the time, these raised Precincts, the upper Precinct, the upstairs

seemed a good idea. They were going to try and do it like the Rows at

Chester, you know…But it didn’t seem to work. Nobody went upstairs

and of course half the buildings upstairs were shut…I hardly ever use to

30
 go up on two levels when it was built other than to visit the electricity

showroom. [87]

In relation to the latter, at least one respondent felt that the placement of the gas and

electric showrooms on the upper level was an attempt by the ‘planners’ to force people

to use the upper level, and thus to ‘compensate for their mistake.’ In fact, it was not

until Marks and Spencers extend its ground floor premises in 1960 (at the expense of its

floorspace in the upper level of the precinct) that a ramp was provided. This final

example thus provides a good illustration of how the planner’s conceptions of the future

Coventry proved at odds with Coventrians’ appropriation and use of the new city.

Conclusion

The plan aimed – realistically Gibson believed – at laying the foundations for a

city which would be more convenient for all its inhabitants, which would be

more beautiful, which would give a better environment for people and would

provide the basis for planning in detail. [88]

In this paper, we have drawn attention to the comprehensive redevelopment of

Coventry city centre in the post-war years; a project driven a series of well-publicised

31
plans. These plans were of course born out of good intentions, namely a desire to build

a modern, beautiful and efficient city centre. How this redevelopment process evolved

politically and municipally both during and after the war is well-documented and

recorded. As Mason and Tiratsoo observe, for those in local government in Coventry

during the 1940s ‘attitudes towards the plan for the city were harder to gauge’ than

were people’s feelings towards welfare provision, and even among the city’s officials

and representatives, ‘while the Gibson plan no doubt did have a strong degree of

bipartisan support, there were also continuing undercurrents of scepticism about its real

viability’ within some local council and business circles. [89] What this paper has

attempted to do is look beyond the political figures and party posturing that confronted

Coventry’s planners in the early post-war years, and focus instead on the views and

experiences of those ‘ordinary’ people whose everyday lives involved the practical

negotiation of a newly emerging, modern urban landscape with its altered street

patterns and continual building activity. Highlighting the varied reactions to the

Coventry plan, as well as some of the mixed experiences of one of its showpiece

developments – the shopping precincts – we have begun to show that Gibson’s plans

were not received unproblematically or greeted with unanimous praise by local people.

To the contrary, it appears that from the outset there were significant public concerns,

doubts and oppositions to the project of modernisation and comprehensive

redevelopment (as well as the well-documented praise and enthusiasm of some). The

fact that these doubts and concerns went largely unvoiced at the time, and that the 1953

public enquiry into the Development Plan for Coventry received few submissions from

32
the public, should not lessen their importance in understanding processes of planned

redevelopment. After all, cities are not solely moulded by planners and plans, being

simultaneously shaped by spatial practices in the seemingly banal but extraordinarily

important realms of everyday life. Hence, we argue that it is vitally important to

understand the ‘view from below’ as well the planner’s ‘view from above’;

reconstruction planning was a ultimately a process that occurred at street level as well

as in the ‘corridors of power’.

We accordingly conclude that post-war British planning ought to be understood

not simply through the documents that guided the shaping and organisation of space:

we need to be mindful of the changing experiences of the city, and the potential

ambiguities and instabilities of everyday life. More than anything, it is when we see the

contradictions between practice and representation that we begin to get a sense of the

ambivalence of ‘modernity’, and the fact that everyday life does not simply reaffirm

existing social relations – plans do not always determine how the city is used, with new

‘lived’ spaces often emerging as people adapt the city to their own ends. As Lefebvre

contends, everyday life is a site of revolution, resistance and ceaseless transformation. In

this sense, the contradictions we have outlined in this paper between planners’ hopes

for the new Coventry, and the experiences of those who lived and worked in the city,

are the contradictions that subsequent generations of planners have had to reconcile as

they have sought to create a city in tune with the mood of the times.

33
Acknowledgements

We wish to thank the Leverhulme Trust for their generous funding of this project, as

well as all those Coventrians who agreed to be interviewed. Our thanks, too, to Dr

Peter Larkham and Professor John Gold for their interest in this work and helpful

discussions.

Notes and references

1. For example see L. Esher, A broken wave: the rebuilding of England 1940-1980 London,

Allen Lane, 1981; J. B. Cullingworth, Town and country planning in Britain London,

Unwin Hyman, 1988 (10th Edition).

2. For example, Stephen Ward suggests that the 1940s ‘saw the dramatic emergence of

an active and mass consensus for planning, widening the basis of its support’, and

likewise, the late Gordon Cherry argued that ‘war damage gave the opportunity to

rebuild, and a new social psychology in wartime Britain provided the

determination’. Peter Hall has suggested that popular enthusiasm for planning in

the post-war period was ‘extraordinary’, and that it provided the basis for a radical

programme of comprehensive rebuilding that would have been ‘unthinkable in the

1930s’. See S. Ward, Planning and urban change Liverpool, PCP Press, 1994, p.80; G.

Cherry, Cities and plans: the reshaping of urban Britain in the nineteenth and twentieth

centuries London, Edward Arnold, 1988, p. 113; P. Hall, Cities of Tomorrow Oxford,

Blackwell, 1988, p. 219.

34
3. See R. Lowe, World War Two, consensus and the foundation of the Welfare State

Twentieth Century British History 1 (1990) 2-28, B. Harrison, The rise, fall and rise of

political consensus in Britain since 1940 History 84 (1999) 301-324.

4. See D. Harvey, Condition of postmodernity Oxford, Blackwell, 1985; B. Latour We have

never been modern Hemel Hempstead, Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993; M. Berman, All

that is solid melts into air: the experience of modernity New York, Simon and Schuster,

1982; B. Conekin, F. Mort and C. Waters (eds), Moments of modernity: reconstructing

Britain, 1945-1964 London, Rivers Oram, 1998.

5. J.R. Gold, The experience of Modernism, Chichester, Spon, 1997; D. Matless Landscape

and Englishness London, Reaktion, 1998.

6. By ‘planner’ we mean here those involved with the planning process at the local

level, which might include architects, surveyors and engineers, as well as planners

per se. J. Hasegawa, The rise and fall of radical reconstruction in 1940s Britain

Twentieth Century British History 10 (1999) 137-161; P.N. Jones, “ … a fairer and

nobler City” – Lutyens and Abercrombie’s plan for the City of Hull 1945 Planning

Perspectives 13 (1998) 301-316; E. Marmaras and A.R. Sutcliffe, Planning for post-war

London: the three independent plans, 1942-3 Planning Perspectives 9 (1994) 431-53.

For the role of local politicians in reconstruction planning, see T. Mason and N.

Tiratsoo, People, politics and planning: the reconstruction of Coventry’s city centre,

1940-53, in J.M. Diefendorf (ed), Rebuilding Europe’s bombed cities Basingstoke,

Macmillan, 1990.

35
7. P. Hubbard, K. Lilley and L. Faire, Remembering post-war reconstruction:

Modernism and city planning in Coventry, 1940-1962’ Planning History 24 (2002) 7-

20.

8. M. Miles, Wish you were here, in S. Speir (ed), Urban visions: experiencing and

envisioning the city Liverpool, Tate Liverpool Press, 2002.

9. ibid, p. 132.

10. N. Thrift, Cities without modernity, cities with magic, Scottish Geographical Magazine

113 (1997), p. 143.

11. See G.E. Cherry, The evolution of British town planning London, Leonard Hill, 1974;

Ward, op. cit. [2]; N. Tiratsoo, J. Hasegawa, T. Mason and T. Matsumura, Urban

reconstruction in Britain and Japan, 1945-1955: dreams, plans and realities Luton,

University of Luton, 2002.

12. See especially P. Johnson Marshall, Rebuilding cities, Edinburgh, Edinburgh

University Press, 1966, pp.291-324; also J. Hasegawa, Replanning the blitzed city centre:

a comparative study of Bristol, Coventry and Southampton 1941-50 Buckingham, Open

University Press, 1992; N. Tiratsoo, Reconstruction, affluence and Labour politics:

Coventry 1945-60 London, Routledge, 1990.

13. Gold, op. cit. [5]; D. Voldman, Reconstructors’ tales: an example of the use of oral

sources in the history of reconstruction after the Second World War, in Diefendorf

(ed) op. cit. [6].

14. A. O’Shea, English subjects of modernity, in Nova, M. and O'Shea, A. (eds) Modern

times London, Routledge, 1996.

36
15. This caricature of pre-war Coventry comes from the Plan for the new Coventry, no

date [c.1942], p.3. Copy in Coventry City Record Office (hereafter CCRO).

Reprinted from D. Gibson, A plan for Coventry Architect and Building News 165

(1941) 188-95. For a less emotive view of the characteristics of pre-war Coventry, and

an aerial photograph of the city centre prior to the blitz, see W.B. Stephens (ed), The

Victoria history of the County of Warwick, volume 8, the City and County of Coventry and

Borough of Warwick London, Constable, 1969.

16. G. Shankland, cited in Coventry looks ahead Architects’ Association Journal 72 (1956)

4-15.

17. G. Logie, The lessons of Coventry Architect and Building News 222 (1962) 42-55.

18. See Johnson Marshall, op. cit. [12], p. 292; Anon., Coventry rebuilds Architectural

Design 112 (1958), p. 476.

19. Midland Daily Telegraph (May 12 1936), p. 6.

20. See Gold, op. cit. [5].

21. Over a thousand visited this exhibition, in addition to all senior school-children in

the city – Coventry Standard (May 18 1940), p. 7.

22. Le Corbusier, Towards a new architecture London, Architectural Press, 1927 (English

translation), p. 71.

23. See J. Gold, ‘Death of the boulevard’ in N. Fyfe (ed) Images of the street London,

Routledge, 1998; see also Gold, op. cit. [5].

24. This figure is much smaller than for Exeter, Bristol and Plymouth, but is partially

explained by the fact that the pre-war city centre remained dominated by

37
 workshops and residential land use - see R. Childs, A comparison in progress in

rebuilding bombed cities Architect’s Journal 120 (1954) 41-52.

25. The Home Secretary’s reaction to looting in Coventry is documented in N.

Longmate, Air raid London, Hutchinson, 1976, pp. 180-185.

26. Reith recorded in his autobiography, Into the wind, that ‘Coventry would be a test

case – not for me but for my government and for England’; see Coventry rebuilds

Architectural Design 112 (1958), p. 473.

27. According to Hasegawa, op. cit. [12], pp. 30-32, Gibson felt that Reith showed little

interest in the execution of the Coventry plan, with financial support from central

government limited. Gibson’s memoirs reveal that he ‘He was not to my liking: he

was more interested in speaking than listening’ - Donald Gibson, hand-written

memoirs, unpublished: CCRO (1972) 623/1/5.

28. The tensions between Ford and Gibson were evident in debates over the width of

new streets and their ability to meet future traffic projections; the height of office

books in the new precincts; the opening up of Broadgate to construct a new civic

space and the preservation of certain buildings. Cf. D. Gibson, hand-written

memoirs, unpublished in CCRO (1972) 623/1/1 with E.H. Ford, ‘Some problems of

redevelopment’, unpublished paper to Leamington Rotary, CCRO (1947) 1327/2/2.

29. Plan for the new Coventry, op. cit. [15].

30. ibid, p.3.

31. ibid, p.3.

32. ibid, p.2.

38
33. ibid, p.2.

34. Coventry was widely written of at the time as a ‘test-bed’ for comprehensive

planning, being prominently featured in the architectural press in the 1940s and

1950s. See, for example, D. Rigby-Childs and D. Boyne, Rebuilding Coventry

Architect’s Journal 118 (1953), 428-47; N. Pevsner, Canons of criticism Architectural

Review 55 (1951) 3-6; J.M. Richards, Coventry Architectural Review 56 (1952), 3-7.

35. This figure was an estimate given by ex-mayor Sir Ernest Benn in an article that

argued for finances to be directed into the short-term repair of surface shelters rather

than a long-term redevelopment project – Midland Daily Telegraph (March 22 1941),

p. 3. He later apologised to Gibson in print, stating he had exceeded the limits of fair

comment.

36. Rigby-Childs and Boyne, op. cit. [34], p. 424.

37. Johnson-Marshall, op. cit. [12], p. 306.

38. Plan for the new Coventry, no date (CCRO), p. 3.

39. Donald Gibson, hand-written memoirs, unpublished in CCRO (1972) 623/1/1.

40. ibid, 623/1/3.

41. This emphasis on the visual relationships between ‘new’ and ‘old’ Coventry, and the

importance of opening new vistas, was presented as a benign and common-sense

recognition of the need to develop a visually coherent townscape. In contrast, it

might be argued that this ‘way of seeing’ implied the need for a particular moral,

social and spatial order, and was hence implicated in power relations - see J. Jacobs,

39
 Heritage and development in post-Imperial London Environment and Planning (D) -

Society and Space 12 (1994) 751-772.

42. D. Gibson, The reconstruction of towns in E.A. Gutkind (ed), Creative demobilisation:

case studies for national planning London, Kegan Paul, 1943, p. 209.

43. For example, the retirement of Gibson in 1954, and his replacement by Arthur Ling,

led to several important deviations from the 1941 plan, including the development

of three high-rise ‘terminal’ blocks at the end of the precinct axes. See The latest

proposals for Coventry’s city centre Architects’ Journal 126 (1957), pp. 770-1; also

Architects’ Journal 130 (1961), p. 528.

44. These details are made clear in files belonging to the Town Clerk held at the CCRO:

CCA/TC/27/1/1-4.

45. CCRO, letter from Frederick Smith to editors of newspapers and periodicals

(October 5 1945) (CCRO: CCA/TC/27/1/4); unsigned, undated memorandum headed

‘Exhibition Publicity’ (CCRO: CCA/TC/27/1/4); unsigned, undated memorandum

(CCA/TC/27/1/4).

46. This is shown in one of a series of photographs taken of the exhibition by Messrs

Thompson Ltd of Coventry and included in an album now kept at CCRO:

CCA/TC/2/22.

47. City of Coventry, The future Coventry (Coventry, 1945), CCRO copy: CCA/TC/27/1/7;

see also letter from Frederick Smith to Albert Herbert, 13 October 1945 (CCRO:

CCA/TC/27/1/3).

40
48. Coventry Evening Telegraph (October 20 1945), p. 7. By way of comparison 23,913

attended the month-long “Plan for Bath” exhibition in Bath in Spring 1945 (Western

Press, March 7 1945). At Wolverhampton, only 2444 attended a ‘housing and

planning exhibition’, see P.J. Larkham, Rebuilding the industrial town: wartime

Wolverhampton Urban History 29 (2002), p.401.

49. Tiratsoo, op. cit. [12], p. 29.

50. Letter from ‘Modernist’ to Midland Daily Telegraph (May 9 1940) p. 6.

51. Letter from Herbert Edwards to Midland Daily Telegraph (October 10 1945) p. 8.

52. Letter from ‘Housewife’ to Midland Daily Telegraph (October 12 1945) p. 3.

53. Letter from D.D. (Kenilworth) to Midland Daily Telegraph (October 20 1945) p. 5.

54. D. Gibson, cited in Logie op. cit. [17], p. 12.

55. Civic Affairs (February 1952), p. 2. Civic Affairs was a newspaper issued by Coventry

City Council on an irregular basis, circulated via libraries and the council offices.

56. For a description of how Foucauldian notions have informed deconstruction of

visual images, including maps and photographs see G. Rose, Visual methodologies

London, Sage, 2001.

57. See especially E. Soja, Thirdspace Oxford, Blackwell, 1996; R. Shields, Lefebvre: love,

space, struggle London, Routledge, 1999.

58. H. Lefebvre, The production of Space Oxford, Blackwell, 1991.

59. M. de Certeau, The practice of everyday life London, Hutchinson, 1984, p. 74.

60. See especially D. Frisby, Cityscapes of modernity Oxford, Blackwell, 2002.

41
61. J. Holsten, The Modernist city: an anthropological critique of Brasilia, Chicago,

University of Chicago Press, 1991.

62. N. Fyfe, Contested visions of a modern city: planning and poetry in post-war

Glasgow Environment and Planning (A) 28 (1996) 387-403.

63. See L. Sandercock (ed), Making the invisible visible: a multicultural planning history,

Berkeley and London, University of California Press, 1998.

64. Oral history is used here to describe a broad range of qualitative interviewing

techniques which encourage people to recount their life stories or provide

retrospective personal testimonies of particular places or issues – see M. Somers,

Narrative, narrative identity and social action: rethinking British working class

formation Social Science History 16 (1992) 591-630. On the use of oral testimony in

planning history see especially Gold, op. cit. [5] and Voldman, op. cit. [13].

65. A fuller methodological statement is required than space allows for here. Interviews

were conducted by Dr Lucy Faire. One of the issues that had to be addressed was

how to take respondents ‘back’ to the 1940s and 1950s, for clearly the opinions and

views they had at the time about what was going on around them will have been

tempered and distilled by their subsequent experiences of living in Coventry. To

help respondents cast their minds back, photographs of the pre- and post-war city

were used in interviews. Inevitably though, memories of fifty years ago were also

intermixed with attitudes towards Coventry as it is today, and the practical

difficulties posed, for example, in negotiating the city centre for some of the

respondents, now in their 70s and 80s. There is, of course, a vast literature on oral

42
 history interviewing and the issues that its use raises. We benefitted from

methodological discussions with Professor John Gold prior to the interview work,

and attempted a biographical and reflexive approach to interviewing and

interpretation. See R.L. Miller, Researching life stories and family histories, London,

Sage, 1999.

66. The interview recordings are currently held at the Department of Geography,

Loughborough University (contact the authors). A duplicate set will be deposited

with the Coventry City Records Office, Herbert Art Gallery and Museum, Coventry.

67. Oral history interview, Celia Grew, b.1938.

68. Oral history interview, June Miles, b.1931.

69. Oral history interview, Basil Witham, b.1928.

70. Oral history interview, Dorrie Glass, b.1922.

71. Oral history interview, Barbara Hesketh, b.1934.

72. Coventry Evening Telegraph (May 15 1953), p. 3.

73. Civic Affairs (April 1948), p. 2.

74. Oral history interview, Gerald Basketts, b.1936.

75. Oral history interview, Jean Basketts, b.1936.

76. Oral history interview, Maggie Rosher, b. 1930.

77. Coventry Evening Telegraph (March 14 1950), p. 7.

78. Oral history interview, June Miles, b. 1931.

79. Oral history interview, Trevor Matthews, b. 1938.

80. Oral history interview, Frank Barnett, b.1920.

43
81. This underlines that the politics of the modernising city are not just about spaces of

representation and experience, but also times – a point highlighted in the work of

Paul Virilio on dromology – literally, the ‘politics of speed’. This implies that

planning is about pace-making: establishing channels of action that privilege some

flows, but retard others in a geography of speed and slowness. See P. Virilio, Speed

and Politics: An Essay on Dromology New York, Semiotext(e), 1986.

82. Oral history interview, Mike Lee, b. 1938.

83. Oral history interview, Celia Grew, b.1938.

84. Anonymous letter to Coventry Evening Telegraph (July 16 1955), p. 3.

85. This was the reason given by Alderman Hodgkinson, chairman of the wartime

Reconstruction Committee, cited in the Coventry Evening Telegraph (November 19

1955), p. 4. In other reports, it was suggested simply that the cost of pram ramps

was prohibitively expensive.

86. Oral history interview, Gerald Basketts, b.1936.

87. Oral history interview, Basil Witham, b.1928.

88. Coventry Evening Telegraph (February 7 1953), p. 3.

89. Mason and Tiratsoo, op. cit. [6], p.104.

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Figure One: The ‘Ultimate Plan’ for Coventry, 1941 (from Plan for the New Coventry).

45
Figure Two: City Engineer of Coventry’s Christmas Card (drawn by Bryan Connell,
Planning Officer, for Ernest Ford, O.B.E., city engineer) (from Architect and Building
News (1946), volume 188, p.235).

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Figure Three: The ‘view from above’: aerial perspective of the new Coventry, c. 1952

(source ???).

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Figure Four: The Upper Precinct completed, postcard c. 1959 (source ???).

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