Coventry: a perambulation

Coventry's 'Medieval Spon Street' is - how can I put this? - shit.  But I am getting ahead of myself.

In between the rail station (a rather successful budget Euston) and the City Centre, the pedestrian is encouraged to play with the traffic.  Unusually, this takes the form of vertical weaving - a bridge across a dual carriageway, then a route under a flyover - rather than horizontal car-dodging that one might expect.

Over...

...and under.

I can only assume there was some pride in the deliberate involvement of the pedestrian with the applied concrete and rapid-transit possibilities of the ring road.  O gleaming post-War ideas, now long-since tarnished!

The reconstructed City is arranged with the spire of the old Cathedral at one end of a major axis, and, erm, an office block at the other.  The shops are arranged around a number of large, pleasant Fifties squares.  And, as ever, subsequent planners and regenerators have a loathing for such open public spaces, and so have adulterated the original spaces in increasingly inventive ways.  One has access to a first-storey walkway by means of a gobsmackingly out-of-scale brick ramp.

Ascending, visually anyway, up to that office block.

Another square has been broken up by trees in not-quite-enclosures (why?) and gifted with a pointlessly large minty-glass escalator box, again affording access to the nothing-much one storey up.

A third one has been fully roofed-over, seeking to pretend it's something tasteful and white, like Welwyn's tastelessly bland Howard Centre.

But even the caffeinated mediocrity of Caffé Nerd cannot hide the enjoyable wackiness of the Round Cafe, which suggests that you'd find tree rings if you cut a slice from the BT Tower.  I am genuinely disappointed not to have been here when it housed a Wimpy.  There is no toilet, the internet informs me.

Beyond that, is the concrete saucer of the covered market, which inventively uses its own roof as a car park.

I never feel comfortable in markets.  They're either the bruised-apple-and-mulitpack-socks places, where I feel like a glowing beacon of overprivilege who should rightly be lynched, or those loathsome 'Farmers' Markets' where I feel like I've stumbled into some freakish cult that worships quiche and believes that the word 'organic' can absolve all manner of saturated fat-related sins.  Shudder.  Still, the building is quite cool - and not a cupcake in sight.

There's something very camp going on with the public art in Coventry, too.  At the Bull Yard (not, of course, to be confused with Birmingham's Bullring, which is, literally, several miles away), there is a representation of Freddie Mercury, holding a 99 Flake, dancing with a drunk bull.  Whilst a miniature Milady from Dogtanian floats in the air.  What did the scroll once say?  'Smurf pilchard dah-doo' would be fitting.

There's also a sculpture of the T-1000 as John Connor's foster mum from Terminator 2.  I appreciate this, as I'm a big fan of James Cameron too.

Behind which is a building with some beautiful concrete so deeply and richly moulded that the only sensical use is not as the city tourist information or an art gallery, but a fried chicken shop.

Also, SRSLY U GUYS, what the hell happened here?

As steps already operate in three dimensions, I can only sum this up-and-back-and-sidewards-and-back-whilst-sloping arrangement as four-dimensional (with the concatening headache and ankle-hurt that concept evokes).

Finally, there is the Coventry's Carry On smut, in the form of the Lady Godiva myth, and her accompanying perv, Peeping Tom.  Here he is, forever caught at the moment of, um, distraction.

All this leads (narratorially, if not geographically) to Medieval Spon Street.  I was perhaps unfair to smear it so summarily with shit.  There is the Blue Bistro, which does a lovely burger, and a pleasantly low-ceiling'd Old Windmill pub, which also does a lovely burger, brought in by the nice man from the Blue Bistro next door.  But, apart from that, there is the disappointing reality of a cheapo grubby pub and ye kebabe shoppe.  

And, erm, a Laser Quest.  The surreality is compounded by an Ikea photobombing the whole thing.

OH HAI!!1

The aforementioned ringroad and other post-war transport infrastructure also necessitates some interesting tarmac-spanning buildings.  Firstly, there's a knock-off version of James Stirling's Florey building, fitted with a magnificent proboscis, doing an impression of Henry the Hoover.

The remarkable bulk of the Brutalist Britannia Hotel straddles the road, with all the grace of an obese chip-scoffer in stilettos, resting her arse on the (daft mock-Grecian) bus station to the right.

But by miles the best is the sports centre, an astonishing metal-clad multi-faceted alien mothership, with a smoked-glass bridge snaking off to suck up unsuspecting humans.  Lovely stuff.

No trip to Coventry would be complete without a visit to Basil Spence's post-war cathedral.  Except it now costs £8, so you may prefer to have four pints for the same price in the nearby (mock-30s-mock-Tudor) Wetherspoons.  Should you head inside, you get to:

1)  See the great stained glass

2)  See some creepy angels

3)  Not have to see the strangely weak porch thing over the South Entrance, which feels like a plywood extension tacked onto the side of the pink-stone solidity of the main nave.

I shall leave you with a picture of that neo-Classical fibreglass bus station, modelled on the one in Athens built by Zeus in 1989.  'Till next time.