Coventry's history - Print version

The birthplace of the Godiva legend and the motor car in Britain, a medieval walled city and 20th century industrial powerhouse, victim of blitzkrieg and a centre of international peace and reconciliation, Coventry is like no other British city. 

Coventry was a scattered settlement when Leofric, Earl of Mercia, and his wife Godiva founded a church which was dedicated here in 1043. By the end of the 14th century, Coventry had become the fourth most powerful city in England.

Enormous wealth, from the sale of high quality fleeces from Midlands sheep, had paved the streets and lined them with a number of handsome buildings in sandstone and timber frame. Coventry soon became a major centre of pilgrimage. The Benedictines, Carthusians, Carmelites and Franciscans all had religious houses in the city and Coventry's Royal Charter of 1345 was the first of its kind in England.

With a two-mile town wall to rival London's, trade guilds whose membership stretched right across Europe and royal patronage in the shape of Coventry-held Parliaments, the city's fortunes seemed secure.

Coventry's changing fortunes

It wasn't until the 16th Century that Coventry's economy fell into crisis marking the beginning of a cycle of boom and slump that has characterised the city's history right up to the present day.

During the Civil War, the city wall helped to guard Royalist prisoners - and gave us the term 'sent to Coventry'. But because of its parliamentary support, the city fell out of favour with the Stuarts and on coming to the throne Charles II ordered the town wall and defences to be destroyed.

As the industrial revolution crashed and hammered its way through Britain, creating new cities, Coventry remained with its ancient streets and an industry based on ribbon weaving.

But by the mid-1800s when the writer George Eliot came to know the city (Coventry was the model for her most famous novel Middlemarch) it was heading for bad times again.

Riots followed the introduction of mechanised looms into a weaving industry based on traditional skills, and by 1860 only soup kitchens were keeping many weavers and their families from starvation. Watchmaking sprang to the rescue, but within a generation, that too was on the decline because of foreign competition. 

Coventry's time-honoured ability to pull a new industry out of the hat when it desperately mattered threw up a new saviour in the shape of bicycles. From humble beginnings in the 1860s the city quickly became the home of the cycle industry in Britain, attracting inventive engineers and entrepreneurs by the train-load. By the last decade of the century, the bloom was rapidly fading from cycle manufacturing.  But then in 1896, the Daimler company began building cars in a disused Coventry cotton mill, and another new industry was born, one that would lay the foundations for the city's extraordinary 20th century expansion.

As cycle manufacturers turned towards the new-fangled 'horseless carriage' the old city was already bulging at the seams, its ancient street pattern and quiet suburbs increasingly under pressure from a tide of immigrants, newcomers like the Whittle family, tempted from bleaker economic climates further north by the distant sound of an engineering boom.

Coventry in the 20th century

Between the wars, Coventry was the fastest-growing urban centre in Britain and the city that rose 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 '50s 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.

Young Frank Whittle's astonishing journey from Coventry terraced street to a place in history as the inventor of the jet engine was exceptional, but by no means unique. An explosion of innovative talent and entrepreneurial dash was putting immense strains on Coventry. It was out-growing itself and something had to give.

Its new cathedral [http://www.coventrycathedral.org.uk/], 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 did not have the variety of industry or the ability 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.

Factory closures, a failure to invest in its once pioneering shopping precincts and increasing unemployment rates gave the city a bleak and dispiriting Ghost Town feel, so articulately voiced by its most famous musical export, The Specials [https://www.thespecials.com/]. Its image, once so vibrant and leading edge, worsened and it began to suffer an accelerating brain-drain as many of the most inventive people sought work elsewhere.

Lady Godiva

Apart from Boudicca, Godiva is the most celebrated woman from Dark Ages Britain.

Godiva was very religious and had her jewellery converted into religious images and crosses. She was known for her generous gifts to abbeys and churches, and, with her husband, paid for churches and religious houses in Leominster, Worcester, Evesham, Burton-on-Trent, Hereford, Stowe and Chester.

In the 1040s they paid for a church in Coventry, possibly on the site of an earlier building destroyed by the Danes in 1016. On her deathbed, Godiva is said to have left her personal rosary to the church, which became a major centre of pilgrimage in the early Middle Ages.

Though considered a wise and religious figure, Leofric was involved in the brutal pillage and destruction of Worcester in 1041, after the town defied a royal tax collector. And it is said that Godiva made her famous naked horse ride as a bargain with her husband to free the people of Coventry from the heavy taxes he had forced on them.

The story of the ride was first told in the 12th century, some 150 years after her death in 1067, while Peeping Tom is a later addition, first appearing in the tale in the 17th century.

A striking statue of Godiva stands in the city's central square, Broadgate. Sculpted by William Reid-Dick, it was unveiled in 1949 and is one of the few statues of horses outside London to be listed (Grade II).

It is not known when or where she was born, but according to the Evesham Chronicle she married Leofric, Earl of Mercia, in around 1035, becoming Godiva, Countess of Mercia. She was a wealthy woman in her own right and owned land in Coventry, Warwickshire, Ansty and Madeley.