Coventry Canal, Coventry

Best for: Art The five and a half miles from Hawkesbury Junction, where the Coventry Canal links with the Oxford Canal, to the city’s canal basin has been made into an extended art gallery. The canal was a prosperous and busy waterway mainly used for moving coal as the fuel of the industrial revolution and the Art Trail has 27 works, drawing mainly on canal and industrial themes. Works include interpretations of lock gates, a statue of James Brindley, the famed 18th-century canal engineer (though he was dismissed from the Coventry Canal project for lack of attendance), and celebrations of local manufacturing like Daimler vehicles, Britain’s first production car. It’s not rural pretty but this walk shows how the canals brought the countryside into the city and carried the urban out into the agricultural lands, creating an interchange between the two worlds.