As is traditional at this time of year the Coventry Society looks back on what has happened over the past year. It’s been a busy year as you will see!
Campaigning
We continue to campaign to improve our city and save our remaining heritage, culture and natural environment. In particular we continue to fight to save green land and in particular to try to stop the Council developing land it owns in the Coundon Wedge. As a corollary to this we support the development on brownfield land – in particular we supported the innovative scheme at Abbott’s Park, which the Council refused.
We continue to campaign to improve the City Centre South scheme, which is set to destroy a large part of the city’s mid-20th Century heritage, as well as some significant cultural elements. We are particularly disappointed at the closure of the Litten Tree Building, which has been our home for the last year. We campaigned to have some affordable housing in the scheme and that has now been agreed, but at the cost of even more intensive development.
In the absences of a proper review of Coventry’s Heritage Action Zone, we published our own review, which showed that the HAZ had done well in relation to our medieval heritage, but failed miserably with our 20th Century heritage.
We don’t always oppose the City Council. We have supported their ambitious plans for a Giga Factory to make vehicle batteries at Coventry Airport. We support their recent initiatives to bring Houses in Multiple Occupation under control.
We also supported the plans to establish Conservation Areas in Earlsdon and Brownshill Green.
Consultation
The City Council has kept us busy responding to consultations and we have responded to more than twelve during the year:
- One Coventry Plan
- New conservation areas
- Transport Strategy
- Energy SPD
- Open Space SPD
- Affordable Housing SPD
- Urban forestry and Tree Strategy
- Heritage Strategy
- Residential New Build design guide
- Houses in Multiple Occupation and Article 4 Directions
- Criteria for local listing
- City Centre South – revised scheme.
- Cultural Strategy refresh
Listing and Celebrating
We submitted two buildings for national listing, the Coventry Prep School on Kenilworth Road, the Firs, and Gibbet Hill Farmhouse, the childhood home of Sir Henry Parkes. Both were refused by Historic England.
We also submitted local listing applications for the former Paris Cinema, St. Columbas United Reformed Church, and 8 – 10 Corporation Street. We also commented on the council consultation on the local listing of buildings.
We submitted the new Ring Road Under park for the Royal Fine Art Commission Trust Building Beauty Awards, unfortunately without success.
During the year we installed two blue plaques, at the Firs on Kenilworth Road and at Philip Larkin’s birthplace in Radford. We also contributed our thoughts to the developing City Council Blue Plaque scheme.
Partnerships
We continued our partnership work with other organisations, including the Guildhall stakeholders group, the Sherbourne River Cultural Programme and the Sherbourne Valley Project.
We partnered with Reading University on a research project to investigate how buildings get planning permission. We chose the Salt Lane Car Park for the project and has several meetings with the researchers.
We also supported our umbrella organisation, Civic Voice, with some problems that impacted on them during the year.
We held our first Boules Tournament in May, courtesy of the Coventry Petanque Club, who showed us how to play, told us the rules and supervised us.
We held two sessions in partnership with Coventry Digital Archive, helping to create meta data for photographs in the Arthur Cooper Archive. These are photos of Coventry taken by news photographer Arthur Cooper between the 1940s and 1960s which have lost their supporting information.
We made a contribution towards the cost of returning one of the Hutton sketches to the Cathedral, in support of the Friends of Coventry Cathedral.
Planning Applications
We continue to list all the significant planning applications in the city on our website and we commented on a twenty or so planning applications during the year. We are currently struggling with the council’s upgraded Planning Portal, but we will continue to support the public for as long as we can.
Visits, Meetings and a Conference
During the year we had visits to Jag 2.0 Plug and Play at the Belgrade Theatre, Coventry Synagogue, the Daimler Powerhouse, the War Memorial Park, Christ Church and the Sherbourne Valley Project.
All of our meetings are now held in person. We had nine during the year, with talks from Chris Arnot, Jaqui Ibbotson, David Butler (Head of Planning), Bret Willers and Tony McNally (climate change), Colin Knight (Transport Strategy), historian Peter Coss, and Matt Parker-Wooding (the city’s archaeologist). We also had a film show at Christmas.
In October we held our Heritage Conference – The future of Coventry’s Past 2. This was a follow up to our first conference which was held in 2019. Heritage organisations and key players from across the city came along to tell us all what they are doing and to discuss the future.
Communications
We published 156 stories on our News Blog during the year, including 21 editions of Peter Walter’s popular series of “lockdown walks in the city”. In addition, we maintain a social media presence on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Youtube and Flickr.
You can find out more about the Coventry Society on our website and if you like what you see, perhaps you might consider joining us.
