Come'n'try Coventry

Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls. If you ever get married, find a wife with a good-...

Hold on, I'll rephrase that. Gentlemen, boys, if you ever get married, find a wife with a good sense of direction. For if, as we did today, you find yourselves on the Coventry ringroad, you will learn that her value is above rubies. Though I knew that already.

The Coventry ringroad was designed by Satan on a particularly off day, when he had just lost a carefully groomed 99 year old mass murdering adulterer to a deathbed repentance and so was in a fouler mood than usual. The spirals within spirals, some going up, some going down, do have a certain Mandelbrot charm to the right kind of mind; but the slip roads, where in-coming and out-going traffic must cut across each other through the same 100 yard gap ... sorry, that's just mean.

Having penetrated to the city centre, parking was a further new experience. We had cunningly chosen Lanchester Polytechnic Coventry University's open day, and everywhere we went we saw signs saying "Open Day: Use Public Car Parks". The public had needed no second bidding. Finally we came across a car park that was half empty, full of university-reserved parking spaces. The attendant wouldn't let us use it because he said that although he wouldn't book us, chances were good that a university jobsworth would. Thanks, guys, that's not a dog in the manger attitude at all. Huh. Once a poly, always a poly ...

Finally we found a car park outside the ringroad near the Coventry Canal Basin. Well, knock me down with a feather. Three years I was at Warwick, and ... Coventry has a canal basin?

Coventry has a canal?

Cor.

Anyhoos. The purpose of this expedition was to see the mighty Coventry Cathedral. I don't think I've been back since my graduation ceremony twenty years ago ...




and Best Beloved hasn't seen it at all, until today.

I love Coventry Cathedral. (Still not as much as Salisbury, mind ...) I love it because it is modern, timeless and pleasing on the eye. I love it for the way it was designed from the ground up as a symbol of reconciliation, following the city's comprehensive luftwaffing in November 1940. I love it for its sheer proof that contrary to so much counter evidence (much of which is elsewhere in Coventry), we could build decent buildings that were pleasant to behold during the 1950s. If all our post-war reconstruction had taken the same pains, our national character today would be very different.

Take, by way of contrast, Guildford Cathedral, a building of roughly similar vintage, planned before the war and finished after. It's basically a modern copy of yer trad cathedral and looks like something Albert Speer might have built if he had been given a cathedral brief and a pile of red bricks that needed using up. Coventry takes the trad cathedral concept - a big rectangular building where people worship'n'all - and does something brand new with it. It is full of space and light, almost ethereal. It adjoins the remains of the old cathedral, which is still officially consecrated, so that the two are part of a greater whole. It is also distinctly lower than the old one, to symbolise repentance.

And ... and so on. Just go and see it.



The first time I saw the cathedral - as a prospective student staying the night in Coventry prior to my interview at Warwick - I was so moved that I felt in my bones I would one day write the definitive science fictional treatment of its story. Actually this lot was not to fall to me - it fell to Connie Willis with her wonderful, witty and moving To Say Nothing of the Dog. However, though I say it myself, my own little effort ("Cathedral No. 3", published in Interzone November 1996, html or PDF) isn't too bad ... even though I have since realised it should, technically, be Cathedral No. 4.

To which I say, canal basins.