"Cov" Coventry by TheLongTone

Finding myself suddenly in Coventry with a sunny afternoon to make the best of.....

Medieval cities sat behind walls. Coventry, which has been an important place for longer than now-larger places such as Birmingham, is one of those cities whose ramparts are formed by a ring-road, of the sort that isolates a city centre.

Its present day shape is notoriously down to one night in 1940, when the old city centre (rather than the outlying industrial areas) was victim to the Luftwaffe: the cathedral was reduced to a shell and most of what had been a well-preseved medaeval city centre was destroyed,

The approach taken to rebuilding the city was radical: it's flagbearer the decision to leave the shell of the old cathedral as was and to build a new cathedral church adjoined to the old, a remider and a warning.

This is the way to do it: this Rudge sidecar combination circumnavigated the globe in 1927/8, France Germany Austria Serbia Bulgaria Turkey Anatlia Syria Meopotamia, India....

This is an exhibit in the excellent Museum of Transport. Wich in Coventry means rather more than a collection of bicycles, motorbikes cars and various points inbetween, because Coventry was a great centre of both automotive and other small or precision engineering manufacture. So the exhibits reflect the past life of the city, many having beenmade here.