Coventry was an interesting smallish-sized town, but it’s a town that seems like it’s still in search of an identity. I can imagine that back when it was a town full of medieval-style buildings, when the towering Gothic cathedral dominated the surroundings and when the central market plaza was a vibrant meeting place for the towns people, Coventry could have seemed a livelier place.

However, the original cathedral was destroyed by bombs in WWII. A new cathedral was erected after the war next to the ruins, but IMHO it lacks the charm and character of the older construction. Elsewhere in town, the sections of the original medieval town that survived WWII were deliberately (!) torn down in the early 1970s to make way for modern construction of a “shopping center”, which is part indoor and part outdoor shopping mall spanning many blocks in the center of town.

The parts merge together in unexpected ways , too. For example,  in the photos below, the outdoor fountain was on one part of the street; turn around and you were suddenly at the start of a covered entrance into the indoor part of the mall.

Anyway, a few years after the decision to tear everything down, somebody realized what a huge mistake they had made.  So since the mid 1970s there has been an effort to reconstruct medieval-style buildings on a single street at the edge of town. I guess the intent was to create an artist colony that would attract tourists via a lot of quirky businesses they hoped would move into all the new/old buildings.

However, as far as I could tell, that hasn’t been a roaring success. The few buildings that they put back up now house only restaurants. Well, there was a toy store in one spot, but it was closed for the summer. Nothing interesting enough for a casual tourist who was visiting there on a weekday in July. I ate lunch in a restaurant that was in a reconstructed medieval half-timber building whose big claim to fame was having been based on a structure built in the 1600s; since I live in a building in Tübingen that was really built in 1508, I wasn’t overly impressed. While the food there was fine, there were no other customers, which added to the feeling that the whole area is a little forlorn and deserted, even though it’s still under active (re)construction.

Coventry also inexplicably doesn’t make a big deal about its part in a rather famous legend: did you remember without looking it up that the story of Lady Godiva was from Coventry? Not only did I not remember it, when I ran across a statue of her in the middle of the outdoor shopping mall (former town market plaza), there weren’t helpful signs nearby to prod my memory, so I was puzzled as to why there was a statue of Lady Godiva and her horse in the middle of town. Oddly,  I had seen nothing about this in any store or tourist information center, nor was it mentioned on the tourist map I’d gotten of Coventry. A strange omission of what should bring a nice little niche market tourist trade for tchatchkas and the like.

FWIW,  the original legend was that Godiva thought her husband, the landowner in control of Coventry, was taxing the citizens too much (literally to death). She pleaded with him to stop, but he refused. When she continued to implore him to do the right thing and treat the people of Coventry better, he retorted that he would stop the taxes on the day she rode naked through the town square. He didn’t expect her to do that, of course, but she actually did do it, famously arranging her hair strategically on her ride through town. To his credit, her husband kept his word, and suspended the taxes; Godiva, therefore, is seen as the savior of Coventry.

There’s a modern addition to the story, where the townspeople weren’t supposed to look out of their windows as Godiva rode by, but a guy named Tom did and was executed as a result. That part isn’t in the original version of the tale – the original story was about  Godiva saving all the people in the town, including all men named Tom. 😉

Of course, I know all this from what I have read online since we returned from Coventry. I never found any of this mentioned in Coventry. They are missing the boat here – remind me to write them a letter, they clearing missing a big opportunity here, don’t you agree?

BTW, in that letter I’m also going to ask them what the deal is with the elephant statues everywhere. No information was on display about that anywhere as I walked around Coventry, but there were elephant things scattered all over town.

Anyway, below I’ve put a selection of photos from Coventry. I haven’t labelled them, but  based on the descriptions above, hopefully you can sort out what’s what more or less. You’ll at least have a little more information than I had that day I was wandering around Coventry.