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Free Essays - Geography Essays
Coventry and Canterbury: How their form today is shaped by the history of their development and evolution, and by the natural factors that make up their settings.
Introduction
Famous for it’s Cathedral and the legendary exploits of Lady Godiva Coventry has, in the modern era, been known for the extensive bombardment during the Second World War and the growth (and subsequent decline) of the British Motor Industry. Canterbury is a cathedral city in the county of Kent in southeast England and is also the seat of the Archbishop of Canterbury, the primate of the Church of England. The form of both cities today is the result of the role of architects and planners in the planning and redevelopment of post-war British towns and cities. The deficiencies of the pre-war city (e.g. congestion, pollution and disorder) were contrasted with the promise of an aesthetically and morally ordered modern townscape. Historical perspectives are the crucial links that contextualise the evolution of spatial planning in Coventry and Canterbury – without understanding how history has helped shape the forms of these two cities it would be impossible to determine the factors involved in establishing the modern setting.
Prior to exploring the evolution of the form of modern day Coventry and Canterbury, it is instructive to briefly review the issue of local planning. The town and country planning system provides the main framework of land use in Britain. This aims to secure the most efficient and effective use of land in the public interest. Local authorities usually decide on whether to allow proposals to build on land or to allow its use to change. Development plans set out the authority’s policies and proposals for the development and use of land in its area. The development plan guides and informs day to day decisions as to whether or not planning permission should be granted, under the system known as development control. In order to ensure that those decisions are rational and consistent, they must be made in accordance with the development plan adopted by the authority. There must be public consultation and proper regard to other relevant matters (sometimes called ‘material considerations’). The law (Section 54A of the Town and Country Planning Act 1990) requires that decisions made should be in accordance with the development plan unless material considerations indicate otherwise. Although plans do not have to be rigidly followed, they provide a firm basis for rational and consistent planning decisions. They give everyone concerned with development in an area a measure of certainty about what kind of development will and will not be permitted during the life of the plan. Local plans and UDPs identify particular areas as suitable for housing, employment, retail or other uses, and set out the policies that the authority proposes to apply in deciding whether or not development will be permitted. The preparation of development plans gives the community the opportunity to influence the policies and proposals for the future development and use of land in their areas. Because the development plan forms the statutory basis for planning decisions, it is important that local people are involved in their preparation. There are several opportunities for people to make their views known during the preparation process.
Historical Development
Coventry is the ninth largest city in England with a population of 304,746 (2002 estimate), located in the West Midlands of England. Near the M6, M69 and M40 motorways, it is also served by the A45 and A46 roads. For rail, Coventry railway station is served by the West Coast Main Line, and has regular rail services between London and Birmingham (and stations beyond). It is also served by railway lines to Nuneaton via Bedworth. There is a line linking it to Leamington Spa and onwards to the south coast. Bus services in Coventry are operated by Travel West Midlands (under the name Travel Coventry) and Stagecoach. The nearest major airport is Birmingham International Airport, some 10 miles (16km) to the west of the city. Coventry has its own airport, Baginton, which is largely a freight airport. The Coventry Canal terminates in the city centre. The Coventry Canal is a narrow Canal in England which travels for 38 miles (65 km) between Coventry and Fradley Junction, just north of Lichfield, where it joins the Trent and Mersey Canal. It also runs through the towns of Bedworth, Nuneaton, Atherstone, Polesworth and Tamworth.
Coventry is traditionally believed to have been established in the year 1043 with the founding of a Benedictine Abbey by Leofric, Earl of Mercia and his wife Lady Godiva. In time, a market was established at the abbey gates and the settlement expanded. By the 13th century Coventry had become a centre of many textile trades, especially those related to wool. Coventry's prosperity rested largely on the dyers who produced "Coventry blue" cloth, which was highly sought after across Europe due to its non-fading qualities. Due to its textile trade, by the 14th century and throughout the medieval period, Coventry was the fourth largest city in England, with a population of around 10,000; only Norwich, Bristol and London were larger. Due to its commercial and strategic importance, in 1355 construction began on city walls, and was completed in around 1400. With its walls, Coventry was described as being the best defended city in England outside London. Due to its importance, in 1345 Coventry was granted a city charter by King Edward III, and in 1451 King Henry VI granted Coventry a charter, which made Coventry a county in itself, a status it retained until 1842, when it reverted to being a part of Warwickshire. By the end of the fourteenth century Coventry was ranked as the third city of England, with only London and Bristol being more flourishing. A five-gated city wall nine feet thick and 4km around had been erected. However, this was the peak of Coventry's achievement. There followed the dissolution of the monasteries in 1538-9 which enabled a corporation called the Corpus Christi to acquire the lands and buildings of the priory at the city's centre. By 1600 Coventry city had declined to little more than a market town, while neighbouring town, Birmingham, was expanding taking much of Coventry's trade. During the English Civil War Coventry became a stronghold of the Parliamentarian forces. On several occasions Coventry was attacked by Royalists, but on each occasion they were unable to breach the city walls. In 1662, after the restoration of the monarchy, in revenge for the support Coventry gave to the Parliamentarians during the Civil War the city walls were demolished on the orders of King Charles II. Now only a few short sections survive.
In the 18th century Coventry became home to a number of French immigrants, who brought with them silk and ribbon weaving skills, which became the basis of Coventry's economy. Coventry began to recover, and again became a major centre of a number of clothing trades. During the 19th century Coventry became a centre of a number of industries, including watch and clock making, manufacture of sewing machines, and from the 1880s onwards bicycle manufacture, which was pioneered by James Starley. Due to this industrialisation Coventry's population grew rapidly.
By 1914, Coventry's population exceeded 100,000. Due to the outbreak of war many of the factories had been converted to make guns and munitions, even the car factories switched to making transport for the army. Much of the medieval remains of the city were pulled down in 1920, to accommodate the new Council House, and create Trinity Street which opened in 1936. However, German bombs on 14 November 1940 destroyed many of the new buildings including St Michael’s cathedral. Large areas of the city were destroyed in the massive German bombing raid that led to 568 people killed, 4,330 homes were destroyed and thousands more damaged in the attack which destroyed most of the city centre and the city's medieval cathedral. The bombs turned Coventry into the most devastated city in England. As late as the 1920s, Coventry was being described as "The best preserved Mediaeval City in England". However the narrow medieval streets proved ill suited to modern motor traffic, and during the 1930s many old streets were cleared to make way for wider roads. Prior to the bombing, redevelopment plans were being discussed. After the war, the city was extensively rebuilt. After the war had finished, reconstruction of Coventry city began almost immediately. Donald Gibson, City Architect, introduced a new town-planning concept, traffic free shopping precincts (in 1946 the first one was realized in Rotterdam, the idea of which was copied throughout the world.).
While Donald Gibson is widely-identified as the key influence on the shaping of post-war Coventry, there were in fact several planning and redevelopment schemes put forward by him and his colleagues for the rebuilding of the city, the earliest dating back to the creation of the municipal Architects Department itself, in 1938. The pressing need for planning a new city centre was at that time already evident: Coventry was booming on the back of the motor industry, and the suburban built-up area of the city had expanded dramatically during the 1930s, leading to growing problems of traffic congestion and urban blight in the commercial core. A 1936 Editorial in the Midland Daily Telegraph put it bluntly:
Coventry is now emerging from the shackles of a purely utilitarian era, ...an era of commercial revolution allied with civic stagnation...Generations of bad planning - slums, narrow streets, overcrowding, sewers - all the trouble saved up for the future from an unimaginative past must be tackled.
By 1940 Gibson’s department had sketched out new plans for the city, working largely in their own time to do so. Six months later, on 14 November 1940, Coventry suffered the first of two major aerial bombardments which destroyed much of the existing city centre, and damaged two thirds of the city’s housing stock. Amid scenes of some panic (and the near introduction of martial law as looting became endemic), the initial concern was with public order, but as this was restored, the need to redevelop boldly and comprehensively emerged as a new mantra for the city council. The redevelopment of Coventry unfolded, but was hampered by inquests, appeals and disagreements between architects and engineers, Gibson seemed less and less concerned by the appearance of individual buildings, and more concerned with attempts to enliven the townscape with special and interesting things. The rebuilt Coventry Cathedral was opened in 1962 next to the ruins of the old cathedral. It was designed by Basil Spence and contains the tapestry, "Christ in Majesty" by Graham Sutherland and the bronze statue of St. Michael and the Devil by Jacob Epstein. The original precincts at Coventry are now listed buildings.
Hubbard et al (2005) explore the stories of those who lived through this period of intense redevelopment in Coventry in an attempt to tell the whole story of Coventry’s redevelopment in this era. Their interviews with those who lived through the bombing and redevelopment and Coventry shed considerable light on personal experiences of the Blitz and the way that Coventry was reconstructed. All respondents had urgent stories to tell, their desire to recount their life in the city was very obvious. Within these different stories, the impact of the destruction of the city centre on people’s lives differed depending on what stage they were at in their life cycle, as well as their occupation, marital status and place of residence. Those who were old enough to work and were working in the centre of the town as well as those who actually lived in the city centre - were naturally affected by the devastation of Coventry in quite a different way from those who only saw it burning from a distance. For some, the destruction of the city centre was not just one of physical loss, but of personally-felt pain:
On the night of the November blitz, it was like the end of the world because I went down town with a friend the next morning and I thought we’d all have to move away for ever. We were walking over bricks all though the middle of town. And well, there was nothing left.
Feelings of loss and disorientation resurfaced once rebuilding begun. Although people had become accustomed to familiar buildings no longer being there, at least the actual street pattern had remained the same after the Blitz. Reconstruction drastically changed this, as one interviewee recalled:
I remembered watching the redevelopment of Smithford Street because that was a street that just disappeared completely and I couldn’t understand it. You know, why was it disappearing?
Many people interviewed also appear to have regretted what they saw as needless destruction of buildings during reconstruction. This was partly on account of their contribution to Coventry’s townscape but mainly because buildings held specific memories. One recalled her father’s reaction to destruction of some buildings in the part of the city centre where he had lived as a child.
I remember him telling me how upset he was about the buildings where Agers shoe shop and things were. Something was pulled down to put them up and he found that quite upsetting.
The use of testimony provides a rejoinder to the somewhat dispassionate accounts that depict the bombing as a providing a welcome opportunity to redevelop a pre-war Coventry that was dirty, congested and unloved. It is clear that local people regretted the loss of a pre-war city that they often described (positively) as medieval. In this respect, the disagreements over the future trajectory of the city concerned more than just those different individuals who were central to the planning process (for example, members of the architects department, engineers department, city council reconstruction committee). Rather, we have found that the reconstruction of Coventry generated a diversity of opinions and experiences. For example, those who were married-with-young-children at the time said they were simply not interested in reconstruction, because, compared to other things in their lives, the planning of Coventry was not really that important:
You were so busy building your life that things like what the town looked like was not a priority in your life you just wanted to provide for you family.
Another respondent explained that she went along with the rebuilding in a Zombie-like fashion because her husband had returned wounded and it was so difficult looking after him and getting used to him being around that she had a nervous breakdown. These family adjustments were no doubt exacerbated by the chronic housing shortage in the city during the 1940s and early 1950s. The lack of interest in rebuilding was not just confined to this age group. Those who were teenagers at the time blamed their indifference on their age, as one person explained:
I don’t think that when you’re that young you read the papers as much as what you do when you’re older, if you see what I mean. Me Mum and Dad used to discuss it I know. I don’t think when you’re that age you’re that much interested, are you really?
In the immediate post-war years, however, this sort of excitement was the exception. Ambivalence about the redevelopment was much more widespread, with feelings of optimism and excitement tempered by feelings of loss or simply disinterest. As the redevelopment unfolded, punctuated by notable events such as the completion of Broadgate House (1953) and the opening of the Upper Precinct (1955), it became clear that the planner’s vision was not shared by all residents of the city. Criticisms of an architecture of concrete and breeze blocks, with eye-like windows in iron, battleship doorways, and cocktail lighting began to be articulated in the local press, and the inclusion of public art in the redevelopment ridiculed: They kept putting little flower plots and raised beds but it was only to break up the concrete. It was a concrete city centre. Official responses to this included a council notice board in the precincts designed to explain what the art around the city centre symbolised, and articles in the local municipal newsletter Civic Affairs proclaiming the virtues of the new buildings.
What perhaps symbolised the dissonance between planners conceptions and residents lives most clearly was the way the new spaces of the city came to be used. For instance, the new Broadgate traffic island was intended to be consumed visually, although people recalled many examples of people sunbathing or picnicking on it before the council erected railings around it:
When that island was developed that was sacrosanct. You never walked across the grass. I think if anybody did they were likely to be arrested for the breach of the peace. I remember that at some point during either a carnival or something somebody got up on to the statue and put various things on it. Oh dear, outcry in the newspaper.
Reluctance to use the upper level of the new precinct, resulting in its virtual abandonment by retailers, was also reported by many of our respondents, who instead preferred to use the Old Barracks market to the chain stores in the newly-completed Precincts. The provision of the City Arcade in the 1960s was one response to this, an attempt to provide space for smaller and specialist retailers displaced by the redevelopment of the Precincts (and official recognition that retail provision in the city did not match demands). More widely, the tendency of children and teenagers to hang out and meet friends in the Precincts highlighted obvious limitations in Gibson’s planned zoning of the city. The 1945 redevelopment model attempted to show a slick layout of council buildings, if rather unadventurous in design. However, this never materialised and we now have a haphazard mixture of old and new which is exactly the "incoherent unplanned mess" that they were attempting to rectify from the pre-war layout.
Canterbury is a cathedral city in the county of Kent in southeast England. Canterbury has two railway stations; Canterbury West and Canterbury East, the services from these are operated by South Eastern Trains. Canterbury West is served primarily from London Charing Cross with limited services from Victoria as well as by trains to Ramsgate and Margate. Canterbury East is on the service from London Victoria (journey time around 88 minutes) to Dover. The West station was the earliest to be built. It was opened by the South Eastern Railway from Ashford on 6 February 1846; on 13 April the line to Ramsgate was completed. Canterbury East is the more central of the two stations, although it came later, being opened by the London, Chatham and Dover Railway on 9 July 1860. Canterbury was also the terminus of the Canterbury and Whitstable Railway which was a pioneer line, opened in 1830, and finally closed in 1953. The locomotive which originally worked the line, Invicta, is displayed at the Museum. Canterbury is by-passed by the main A2 London to Dover Road. It is about 45 miles from the junction with the M25 London orbital motorway, and 61 miles from central London. The other main road through Canterbury is the A28 from Ashford to Ramsgate and Margate. The hourly National Express coach service to and from Victoria Coach Station, which leaves from the main bus station is typically scheduled to take 110 minutes.
There has been a settlement in Canterbury since prehistoric times. Bronze Age finds, and Neolithic round barrows have been discovered in the area; and before the Roman arrival Durovernum was the most important settlement in Kent. Canterbury (known in Latin as Durovernum Cantiacorum) became a Roman administrative centre: it lay at the junction of three roads from their ports of Regulbium (Reculver), Dubris (Dover) and Lemanis (Lympne); and it stood on what has become known as Watling Street. The city walls and one of the city gates remain. The name Canterbury derives from the Old English Cantwarebyrig, meaning "fortress of the men of Kent". The bury element is a form of borough, which has cognates in words and place names in virtually every Indo-European and Semitic language, as well as others. In 596 Pope Gregory the Great, sent St Augustine to convert England to Christianity. This was the first ever papal mission; St Augustine built a priory on the site of the present cathedral precincts in 597 AD. He also built an abbey outside the city walls where he was buried: as were other early archbishops. Though St. Gregory had planned the division of England into two archbishoprics, one at London and one at York, St. Augustine's success at Canterbury explains how the southern archiepiscopal see came to be fixed there instead of at London. The Ancient Diocese of Canterbury was the Mother-Church and Primatial See of All England, from 597 till the death of the last Catholic Archbishop, Cardinal Pole, in 1558.
In the 16th Century the Church of England split from Rome under Henry VIII. St Augustine's Abbey was destroyed during the Dissolution of the Monasteries ordered by Henry VIII, although ruins remain. During this time Canterbury became the centre of the new Church of England, although a Catholic shrine remains. At the same time, the ancient religious school was refounded as the King's School. Canterbury Cathedral is the burial place of King Henry IV and of Edward the Black Prince, but is most famous as the scene of the murder of Thomas a Becket in 1170. As a result of this event, Canterbury became a major pilgrimage site, inspiring Geoffrey Chaucer to write The Canterbury Tales in 1387. The Hospital of St Thomas was a place of lodging for pilgrims in the city. The city is also associated with the family of Thomas More and was the birthplace of Christopher Marlowe. The city is also the start/finish point for many pilgrimage routes, such as the Via Francigena to Rome, and the Pilgrims' Way to Winchester. French Protestant refugees settled in the city during the sixteenth century: here they introduced silk-making. During World War II the city was severely damaged by bombing after it was selected as one of the cities in England to be targeted by the Luftwaffe in the Baedeker Blitz. In 1944 the city was celebrated by film directors Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger in their film A Canterbury Tale. Canterbury today is a major city for tourism with Canterbury Cathedral alone attracting 1.2 million visitors in 2001. It still contains many ancient buildings and modern building development within the medieval town centre is strictly regulated. However, gradually redeveloped between the 1950s and 1970s with a mixture of offices and retail shops, the Whitefriars shopping centre, and the multi-storey car park, the redevelopment largely erased the historic pattern of streets within the area and opted for an architectural style which was very different from traditional Canterbury. As of 2004 the Whitefriars area is undergoing major redevelopment and the associated archaeological research is called the "Big Dig".
Conclusion
Gibson’s conceptions of the city, embodied in his scenographic representations of space, took markedly different forms and connotations as it was projected into the level of lived space at street level. Importantly, the planning of the post-war city can be understood as the outcome of the ongoing dialectic between representation and experience. Ultimately, it is necessary to examine both to understand why (and how) post-war plans for reconstruction failed, with the attempt to impose visual and spatial logic on the city contested by citizens who felt increasingly alienated from their city.
References
Hubbard P., Faire L. & Lilley K. (2005). Remembering Post-War Reconstruction:
Modernism and City Planning in Coventry, 1940-1962
McGrory, D. (1993). Coventry: History and Guide
Slater, T. (1981). History of Warwickshire
Internet sources - Expedia.co.uk (accessed 12/2005)
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