The future of Coventry Cross - Video and audio transcripts

Cllr O’Boyle: Hello and welcome to my latest little film. You’ll see that I’m in a slightly different spot in the city today and I’ll explain the reasons why in a minute. You can see behind me, is Holy Trinity Church and just up the footpath as you go past the church is the location of what used to be Coventry Cross. So there’s a little bit of a clue as to what I’m talking about today. You’ll remember that we dismantled Coventry Cross sometime ago because it was important that we improved that area to make space for redevelopment of the Cathedral Lanes and of course we promised that there would be a restaurant there. Well, announced now that Turtle Bay is going to be there. That is really good news. It’s a great offer for the city and we’ll attract many visitors. Secondly, I think I need to make the point. I’ve done a lot of videos as you know down in the Precinct. So of course, we did one recently about the old British Home Stores and what we did there to attract retailers and of course we announced that the Fraser Group is going in there as well. So, again, the logic of doing that was to attract retailers. A city is nothing without shops, it’s nothing without restaurant but more importantly it’s nothing without people but you need something to attract them in.  So, I’m standing here, this location, the reason is this is going to be the new location of Coventry Cross.

It's also going to incorporate a replica of the original Coventry cross in effect the Henry VI statue that formed part of that original Coventry cross

This location, if I just move round, this location is as close as you can get to where the original cross used to be. In fact, it used to be at a crossroads and actually just over there was that location. We’re just going to have it here on this piece of greenery. It’s going to form part of the great centrepiece looking back to one of our great three spires, Holy Trinity and will form a really attractive part of our city centre going forward. I promised that we would bring Coventry Cross back to life and incorporate some of the really old original. Again, the best of the old with the best of the new or the best of the old with the best of the old if you like. So really good day for Coventry.