Coventry: A Phoenix Rising from the Ashes or a Chrysalis Waiting to Open?

As I meandered through the various exhibition spaces, I glimpsed snippets of information about the building’s history plastered on the walls. The original lift shaft from the building’s time as the Rover showrooms and the peeling remnants of Disney Stickers marking the location of the Toy Department in one of the incarnations of the Department Store provided tangible reminders of the building’s multi-layered history. I also encountered artists of various ages and backgrounds, who seemed happy to chat to me about their experiences of exhibiting in the Showrooms. The overarching message was clear: Denyer had created a much-needed space in the city where they could exhibit their work. For Anisha Sidhu, a young artist finding her way as a creative practitioner, the LTB Showrooms provided the only forum in the city where she could experiment and network with her peers and more experienced artists. Many of the artists I spoke to also felt that they had been left behind by City of Culture, which, they expressed, had swept through Coventry with a variety of “fun” performing arts events, but had done little to leave a longer-term legacy of support for local artists, or for the visual arts and heritage more generally. As Yeadon commented, locals who wanted to showcase their work in a ‘serious’ venue would have more luck exhibiting in Coventry’s larger neighbour, Birmingham.

The story of destruction and transience permeates Coventry. While the Historic Coventry Trust is making great strides to restore and repurpose the city’s late-medieval heritage assets— including the Charterhouse and the Guildhall as visitor attractions and the City Gates as luxury accommodation—and Historic England have sought to promote economic growth with their High Street Heritage Action Zones initiative, many twentieth-century landmarks are under threat. Locals told me that they were particularly anxious about the fate of the iconic Elephant Building – an unlisted building belonging to the leisure centre which closed in 2020 – and the Priory Visitor Centre – a heritage attraction containing the excavated remains of Coventry’s first cathedral, which, despite its central location, has stood empty for several years. The neighbouring Priory Gardens and Undercrofts have also become a site of antisocial behaviour, and I was warned not to walk through the gardens after dusk, despite them being just a stone’s throw away from the cathedral. Timing was also an issue which surfaced time and time again in my discussions with locals: many felt frustrated that the Elephant Building and the Priory Visitor Centre—buildings which evoke considerable local pride— had remained closed at a crucial point during the 2021 City of Culture celebrations.

During a walking tour of Coventry’s street art with Joe Rukin of Sky Blue City Walks, I was surprised to learn that many of the buildings on which murals had recently been applied are set to be demolished: from temporary structures to disused carparks to the police station. The murals, it seems — many of which reference Coventry’s history and heritage —are often more a superficial attempt at brightening up ‘unsightly’ spaces than a genuine effort to change the ways in the public space around them is conceived of and used.

In some cases, the constant process of renewal and change has given rise to creative opportunities, which might be regarded as in keeping with Coventry’s spirit of renewal and regeneration following its large-scale destruction during the Second World War, and its aftermath. During a visit to Coventry Cathedral, which was famously reimagined after The Blitz, I had a meeting with Mike Tooby, the curator of the recent ‘Broken Angel’ project, which marked a creative response to the irreparable vandalism of John Hutton’s iconic West Screen during one of the Covid-19 lockdowns. Rather than simply replacing the screen with a facsimile, the project has instead seen a sequence of three installations commissioned to occupy the space of the broken panel, the last of which has been created in conjunction with the Coventry carers. In their early conversations, Tooby and the Dean of Coventry Cathedral talked about the project in the context of ‘reconciliatory gestures’, and as a way of extending the spirit of forgiveness which the cathedral itself represents. As we made our way back to the West Window following our meeting, I asked Tooby what will happen to the installations once they are taken down, to which he responded that they were to become the property of the artists. The legacy of the project is again uncertain, yet in this instance it might be regarded as consistent with the constant process of renewal and change which defines urban spaces, and Coventry in particular.

Coventry is famously likened to a phoenix rising from the ashes, yet while watching the 2017 City of Culture bid video, I was struck by a narrator’s description of Coventry as a “chrysalis” from which “the butterfly breaks free”. For me, this latter description has greater resonance and relevance: Coventry is a city already packed with heritage assets – everywhere you turn, there are historically significant buildings and works of public art – yet current creative repurposing efforts are piecemeal and disjointed, and are frequently occurring in spaces which are threatened by demolition and precarity. What became abundantly clear during my visit was that there is a great deal of local pride in the neglected historic buildings already in existence, and a great deal of discontent and concern about the change and destruction that is set to come. Coventry’s renowned spirit of reconciliation, it seems, could be usefully turned inwards to make the most of its many existing heritage assets, which might be harmoniously incorporated – as was so beautifully achieved with Basil Spence’s cathedral –into future visions of the city.