"My Home Town" a Coventry Travel Page by Pete.Gibson

I've lived in Coventry for 6 years now and still have yet to see everthing, I live on the south of the city and we have wonderful parks and woods to walk in

The original name for Coventry is lost in the mists of time but some think in comes from the word Couaen (also spelt Cune) which refers to the meeting place of the waters, there has been many variations over the years Couintre, cofenteium, coventria, before ending up with the current spelling
An interesting note is Old English the letter V wasn?t used and early spellings used a U, which was in fact pronounced as a V
Coventry’s most famous couple

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.

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.
A slump out of which Coventry is slowly emerging
Earl Leofric and Lady Godiva
Lady Godiva, (meaning Gods Gift) was wife to Earl Leofric and lived in Coventry in the early 11th century She is remembered nowadays for riding through the town naked on the back of a horse in a attempt to persuade her husband to lower taxes………… in fact this was very unlikely to have happened, firstly the town wasn’t much bigger than a hamlet in those days and secondly she owned most of the Town!!!

Modern Coventry or certainly post war Coventry became a boom town in the fifties with a large highly skilled workforce and a high demand for cars, Many of the countries famous motoring names came from here, however the decline was soon to follow during the seventies when lots of these famous names disappeared for ever

Sent to Coventry.

This widely used English saying means to ignore someone and not to speak to them
Its origin is believed to come from the 1640s during the English Civil War when Oliver Cromwell sent many Scottish royalists to be detained at St Johns, and whilst these prisoners exercised in the streets of Coventry They where completely Ignored by the strongly Parliemantian Coventry people