The Coventry Society hosted a Heritage Open Day event at Drapers’ Hall on Sunday 17th September 2023, courtesy of Historic Coventry Trust.
Over 370 people visited the Hall to inspect the magnificent restoration of this fabulous building. They also had the opportunity to meet local community organisations promoting the heritage of our city at a Community Heritage Showcase.
Amongst organisations at the event were:
The Weaver’s House – with a display about the project and plans for the future.
Westwood Heath Local History Group – showing the extent of their research into local history in Westwood Heath.
The Freeman’s Guild – with information about the city’s guilds and a medieval Coventry colouring book.
Jane Cobbett with a display of textile design.
Jo Phillips, Your Tour Guide – with a display about the 1940 blitz and the role that Drapers’ Hall played as an air raid shelter.
Coventry & District Archaeological Society (CADAS) with a hands-on display about recent finds in the city.
Warwickshire Wildlife Trust with information about the Sherbourne Valley Project.
CovSoc member, Aaron Law, with a photo display about William Mitchell sculptures in Coventry, the UK and internationally.
CovSoc provided information about the building, put on a display about the Sherbourne Valley and Lady Herbert’s Garden Conservation Area and provided hourly tours of the building.
Our grateful thanks to the Historic Coventry Trust for supporting this event and to the Trust’s volunteers who helped to make the event safe and accessible.
We were staggered by the number of visitors and we hadn’t produced enough leaflets about the history of the building, so we reprint below the text of the leaflet that our Chair, Peter Walters, had written for the event.
“The site on which the Drapers Hall stands was at the core of Coventry’s prosperity in the late Middle Ages.
“It was here in the fifteenth century that a Drapery, or cloth market, was established to regulate the sale of cloth that had made the city wealthy.
“By the time the Drapery was demolished in 1727, new trades were beginning to supplant cloth, and the Drapers Company, traditionally the most powerful of the trade guilds that had ruled the city for hundreds of years, was as much a gentlemen’s club for Coventry’s elite.
“Their first hall, built in 1637, was a ‘dark, gloomy edifice’, the second, erected in 1775, was riddled with dry rot and too small for purpose. And so, in 1830 the company hired Birmingham architect Thomas Rickman to design something a little grander.
“With ballroom, card room, tea room and lavish wine cellars beneath, it opened in December 1832 with a ball that attracted the wealthy and powerful from Coventry and surrounding areas.
“In the decades that followed, among those to attend social events in the hall was the Crystal Palace creator Sir Joseph Paxton, then MP for Coventry. Among the musicians who performed in the ballroom was the virtuoso pianist and composer Franz Liszt.
“During the First World War, the building’s cellars were turned into an air raid shelter for up to a hundred people and in 1939 plans were drawn up for it to take on the same role. It also became the headquarters of the Women’s Voluntary Services (WVS) throughout the war.
“While the building, somewhat miraculously, had survived the Blitz unscathed, by the early 1950s there were proposals to demolish it as part of a landscaping plan around the new cathedral.
“The Drapers Company, who had opposed the plans, sold the hall in 1960 and for the next twenty-five years it was used as a courtroom and as offices for the probation service. By the 1990s it was empty and while many uses were proposed for it, none came to fruition, until the Prince’s Trust took on the task of breathing new life into it as a music venue and a centre for the city’s schools’ music service.”
