Historian and CovSoc committee member, Peter Walters, reminds us of an important building that lies nearly derelict, unused, unloved and forlorn in a Coventry suburb. Peter writes…..
It’s fair to say that mid-Victorian women novelists are having a bit of a moment.
Emily Bronte’s masterful 1847 novel Wuthering Heights has been re-invented, with more than a tweak or two, for a 2026 cinema audience.
The Royal Shakespeare Company has announced that it will be staging a new production of Middlemarch, George Eliot’s great 1870 ‘Coventry’ novel this autumn.
And now comes Bird Grove, a new play exploring the loving but thorny relationship between Mary Anne Evans, as she was then, and her father Robert at the handsome villa of that name they shared throughout the 1840s.
The play ends its run at the Hampstead Theatre in London on March 21st. Reviews have been mixed but it will be a missed opportunity if it doesn’t get another outing in front of Coventry audiences, perhaps at the Belgrade.
And what of Bird Grove itself, where the budding writer met the charismatic Charles Bray and his wife Caroline and lost her religion?
The building, or part of it at least, still stands, set back from the hubbub of the Foleshill Road and hidden by humdrum commercial buildings.
It’s been serving, off and on, as a Bangladeshi community centre since the 1970s but it presents a dismal spectacle these days. Paint is peeling from the walls, buddleia grows from its rooftop chimney pots and the fierce metal fence that surrounds it gives it all the charm of an industrial compound.
Bird Grove is II* listed by Historic England, but as far back as 2018 was identified as a building at risk by the organisation SAVE Britain’s Heritage.
Nothing appears to have changed since then. It was shamefully ignored during Coventry’s ill-fated year as UK City of Culture in 2021, while other elements of the city’s neglected heritage did at least get the funding they merited.
It was long ago mooted that perhaps a restored Bird Grove could become an educational or writers’ centre as a way of perpetuating the memory of one of the true greats of European literature, whose Coventry years turned her into the writer that she became.
Surely the time has come to ensure that whatever use the building is put to, it is at least in a fit state to face the future.
