let’s be BRUTAL
TV AND RADIO HOST AND FORMER TELEGRAPH REPORTER JEREMY DEBATES STATE OF COVENTRY ON VISIT TO CITY
SHOULD Coventry’s concrete buildings be celebrated or confined to the past?
The city’s “brutalist architecture” which is “loved by some loathed by many” was at the heart of a debate on BBC Radio Two’s Jeremy Vine Show this week.
Mr Vine was broadcasting live from the former Coventry Evening Telegraph building, in Corporation Street, which has stood empty since the Telegraph staff moved to its current Coventry base at the Canal Basin in 2012.
Speaking during the show, he said: “Coventry is unique in the sense that the devastation caused by Nazi bombers was so comprehensive town planners thought the silver lining was they could actually plan something very modern.
“50 years on, have the concrete buildings of Coventry really stood the test of time? Should they be preserved or has the city suffered enough?”
Architect and broadcaster Maxwell Hutchinson spoke in defence of Coventry’s architecture.
He said: “It looks wonderful. My father was an architect like me and as a treat, when I was about five or six, he took me from Lincolnshire to Coventry to view the future.
“In Coventry I saw something unlike the tired typical shopping street. A typical street with a pavement, a road and another pavement - totally unsuitable to the mixture of people and vehicles.
“When I was an architectural student, I was taught that people were soft and slow and cars were hard and fast and they shouldn’t be mixed.”
And e added: “Coventry gave the planners the opportunity to show something new. It was emulated, it was the first pedestrianised shopping centre in Europe, it was copied around the world.
“It’s not concrete, it’s rare oolitic limestone from upper Umbria that has that wonderful rich, grey colour. The word concrete is so prejudicial. Concrete is a wonderful material and, in the case of Coventry, it provided us with the opportunity to rebuild.
“Concrete allowed us to save our country after the war. We didn’t have the energy necessary to make bricks, the bricklayers had given their lives in the
war.” concrete bunkers. The Primark building is monolithic, it’s hideous. Someone described it as a peas and chips scoffer in stilettos.”
“Coventry was an act of resurrection. Then the Britannia Hotel came out, and it’s probably the most brutalist building in Britain.
Speaking to the Telegraph after the show, Mr Vine was full of praise for the city where he started his career as a journalist with the Coventry Evening Telegraph during the 1980s.
He said: “I don’t even know who the other cities are, it doesn’t matter, Coventry should be the UK City of Culture, no question. You can have the underside, the downside, with the cultural side.
“There are no pop stars in Hawaii because it’s always sunny. The art is created in places where life is difficult. The Beatles came from Liverpool, because it rains all the time. This is a city where people struggle and some people’s way of expressing that struggle is very powerful art.
“The best example, in recent years, is ‘Ghost Town’ by The Specials.
“When I see the culture that comes out of Coventry, I think it’s because there is some hard living in this city.
“But it has such amazing richness and such an amazing spirit. I consider it a home from home.”