Simon HEFFER
As Coventry celebrates its City of Culture status, Simon Heffer reassesses a beacon of British modernism, the rebuilt St Michael’s
Coventry was an unusual place before the Luftwaffe destroyed large parts of it on the night of November 14-15 1940. It had been a great medieval settlement – and one of England’s great repositories of medieval architecture – then became a centre of the Second Industrial Revolution. Mechanisation and the internal combustion engine meant that, by the 1930s, it was home not just to a substantial motor industry, but to the manufacture of aeroplane engines and arms.
It was thus an obvious target for Nazi bombers. On that night in 1940, 515 of them attacked the city, damaging around two thirds of the city’s buildings. More than 550 people were killed and nearly 900 seriously injured. The marks remain on Coventry today, not least because so much built since is unremarkable. The medieval parts had long been crumbling, and the city was being replanned when fighting broke out. The Luftwaffe gave the planners even freer rein.
As a cultural centre before the Blitz, much of Coventry’s wealth was linked to its fabric and architecture. JB Priestley went there in his English Journey in the early 1930s and was amazed at the amount of medieval work still there. In 1913, Andrew Carnegie gave £10,000 – more than £1million in today’s money – to endow three libraries in the city. In 1938, Sir Alfred Herbert, a local tools manufacturer, donated £100,000 (around £6.5million today) for an art gallery and museum, though this wasn’t begun until 1954. A Theatre of Varieties had been built in 1819, functioning as both theatre and music-hall, but it was demolished in 1903; a 2,000-seater Opera House was built in 1889 and would go the same way in 1961; and so on.
This year, however, Coventry is the United Kingdom City of Culture, with a programme of events scheduled for the moment the pandemic restrictions lift on May 17. Four years ago, the accolade went to Hull, one of whose most significant cultural figures was Philip Larkin, for decades the librarian at its university. Larkin was born in Coventry, but that city seems reluctant to celebrate him, since (as a local newspaper reported during the city’s bid) he was “racist, sexist and foulmouthed”. (But next year is Larkin’s centenary, and there are suggestions that his birthplace may yet honour the greatest poet in living memory.)
In today’s jamborees, “culture” is interpreted broadly: “accessibility” and “diversity” are priorities. One beacon of regeneration, the Belgrade Theatre, will this summer host an Asian film festival, as well as other theatrical events. The institution was the first civic theatre built in Britain after the war; it is named after Coventry’s twin city, then in Yugoslavia, now in Serbia. Belgrade promised consignments of timber that were used to build it. While suffering from the usual problems that the British climate inflicts on concrete constructions – notably water-staining – it is one of Coventry’s better post-war buildings, opened in 1958 before the architectural profession did its worst on the bomb sites of Britain.
By common consent – though not by mine, I must admit – the accolade for the finest manifestation of culture in post-war Coventry goes to the cathedral, where an exhibition called Concrete Collar is due to be held, featuring photographs of the Coventry ring-road (on which construction began in 1959). The cathedral is considered a beacon of modern British architecture not just because of its radical design, but because of what it represented about the rebirth of a community and of Christian civilisation in the face of barbarism.
Until the Blitz, Coventry’s cathedral was not one of the great basilicas of the Middle Ages, but a great parish church that had been redesignated. Coventry was a diocese before the Reformation, but its old cathedral was demolished in 1539. The 14thcentury St Michael’s church became Coventry Cathedral in 1918, when the see was re-established; just 22 years later, it was left in ruins. Had it been a medieval or even Baroque cathedral, an attempt might have been made to rebuild it – as happened in France at Reims and Amiens, battered in the First World War, or the Frauenkirche in Dresden and the Stephansdom in Vienna, wrecked in the Second.
But St Michael’s had been a cathedral but briefly, and a generation of architects were longing to put their stamp on British townscapes. And Coventry’s townscape had been problematic for years. The network of medieval streets sat uncomfortably within a booming industrial city; Hitler’s bombers provided scope for the whole area, including the cathedral precincts, to be reconceived. In most European cities – as, indeed, with the great Wren churches of London – the cathedral would have been rebuilt as it had been.
But the decision was made to preserve the ruins, and the modern cathedral, designed by Sir Basil Spence and built adjacent to them, is generally held in such regard that it is deemed a lapse of taste to criticise it. In the 1990s, it was voted the country’s finest 20th-century building; I suspect the voters cannot have seen Giles Gilbert Scott’s Anglican cathedral in Liverpool. (Scott’s application in 1944 to rebuild St Michael’s was, unfortunately, dismissed by the then-bishop.)
Yet Coventry Cathedral is a building more remarkable for what it contains and signifies than for what it is. Spence ensured that some of the finest artists of the late 1950s and early 1960s contributed to the furnishings: Graham Sutherland’s massive tapestry; John Piper’s stained glass; Elizabeth Frink’s lectern; and Jacob Epstein, who cast a representation of St Michael. The building was a symbol of forgiveness and reconciliation, and of the triumph of life over death.
The architectural historian Nikolaus Pevsner was a great champion of Spence’s building, commending its avoidance of pastiche and citing its popularity; but then, in the years directly after it opened, it was as much an exhibition of the finest modern art as it was a place of worship. Even by the 1980s, when I first visited it, it was showing its age. Scott’s proposal to rebuild the old cathedral in his 20th-century Gothic idiom would at least have provided continuity with the city’s past. Whatever the quality of its contents – cultural artefacts of which the city should be proud – Coventry Cathedral as built by Spence does not exude beauty or charm.
And I feel Coventry’s true claim to be a “city of culture” – its medieval centre – was irreplaceable as soon as the Blitz eradicated it. Perhaps the ongoing regeneration of the city, as the shabby post-war buildings are replaced, will at last provide the landmarks of ingenuity and aesthetic quality that have, since the war, been in too short supply.
It was as much a gallery of the finest modern art as it was a place of worship