In 1962/63 the Charterhouse was used as a youth hostel. Historian and CovSoc member David Fry tells us more…..
The 1962 Cathedral Festival to celebrate the opening of the new Coventry Cathedral was the stimulus for Charterhouse to become a youth hostel. With many young people expected to arrive in the city for the Festival, the City Council had agreed to offer the Charterhouse to the Youth Hostel Association (YHA) for use in the spring and summer months. The report of this development in October 1961 also noted that the City Council was not sure what to do with the building as a proposal to make it into a museum had been rejected; therefore it was considering selling it.
By February of 1962 the proposed youth hostel had been confirmed and was to be let to the YHA rent free. There was talk of Charterhouse becoming a permanent YHA hostel, though a lot of work would need to be done to the building first. For the time being it would offer 20-40 beds on a temporary basis, using just the first two floors.
After all the preparatory work it opened on 7 April 1962 for the summer and closed, as planned, at the end of August.
An entrepreneurial Rugby photographer produced a postcard of the hostel for that first season, shown above. It had been purchased and sent by ‘Jean’ on the 24 August 1962, at the end of her three day stay.
The headline for the Coventry Evening Telegraph for the 22 June 1963 was ‘Coventry Hostel Attack by 15 Hooligans’. A group of 15 youths had attacked the hostel, throwing a dustbin at the kitchen window, entering and smashing up the equipment windows (see photo, below, of the window being repaired the following day). When one visitor went to get the police he was also attacked and injured. So another hosteller climbed out the back over two walls and used the telephone in a nearby house. The police arrived rapidly in three cars. It had been the third occasion that the building had been damaged by youths in the previous week. Concern was expressed that it would put off future visitors.
However, by September when the hostel closed for the winter the organisers were claiming the year had been a success and they were looking forward to opening the following year. But it was not to be; the short life of Coventry’s first and only YHA hostel was at an end. In February 1964 the City Council announced the Charterhouse hostel would not open again as it was engaged in discussions for a permanent alternative use of the building. By May it was suggested it would be bought or leased by Coventry Masonic lodges. This did not happen but Charterhouse was about to enter another of it lives.