John Marshall explores the history of a Coventry church and the reasons for its eventual demise
A PARISH of All Saints still exists in the Stoke area of Coventry but the original church does not. What happened to All Saints Church? And where was it?
A clue to its former location can easily be found on Far Gosford Street where an empty green space – looking remarkably like a churchyard – suddenly interrupts the continuous flow of buildings. This is the site of the old church, with its original stone wall still intact, together with a stone gateway.
All Saints Church began in May 1868 when its foundation stone was laid, with great masonic ceremony, by Lord Leigh of Stoneleigh, the Lord Lieutenant of Warwickshire. Unlikely as it might seem, Lord Leigh claimed to be using a mallet that had previously been used by King Charles II when laying the first stone of St Paul’s Cathedral in London. The mallet, explained Lord Leigh, had entered the ownership of a Masonic Lodge in London and had been brought to Coventry with great care for this ceremony at All Saints.
The church was consecrated in January 1869, at the same time as its sister church, St Mark’s, next to Swanswell Pool in Stoney Stanton Road. Both churches were intended to meet the needs of a rapidly expanding city, whose labouring class had suffered greatly during the economic collapse of the 1860s. Both churches had a strikingly similar style, designed by architects Paull and Robinson of Manchester, and each had seating for 646 people.
All Saints was built in the Early English Gothic style, with locally quarried red sandstone and internal dressings in Bath Stone. There was no tower or spire, but a south-west bellcote had one bell. The church consisted of an aisled and clerestoried nave, a chancel flanked by an organ chamber and a north chapel. The aisles were roofed with small transverse gables, one to each bay.
During its lifetime, many local people from Hillfields and Stoke would have been part of its congregation, especially before St Margaret’s Church was built at Ball Hill in 1910. Both churches were extensively damaged during air raids in the Second World War but restoration work at All Saints was completed in 1950.
Among the many weddings held at All Saints during the post-war period, one notable example involved the marriage in 1965 of a Coventry City footballer, Brian Hill, who was an integral part of Jimmy Hill’s Sky Blue revolution. The Coventry Evening Telegraph reported that Brian Hill would be marrying his bride, Margaret Barnes, at All Saints in the morning and then playing against Bury at Highfield Road in the afternoon.
By this time, however, the congregation at All Saints had dwindled and the future did not look bright. In August 1967 it was announced that the church would permanently close, the principal reason being a city council plan to build a new arterial road which, it was feared, would decimate the parish. It was also said that the 98-year-old church was in a poor state of repair.
The vicar, Rev A F Williams, said the first inroads into the parish were already being made by the next stages of the city’s inner ring road, which at that time was still being built. “The development that really carves up the parish and leaves very little community at all is the Gosford Spur, which runs from the ring road by the Baths to a vast roundabout at the Gosford Street-Cox Street junction,” he said.
“It will then go straight through All Saints School, which is to be rebuilt elsewhere, across Bramble Street, follow the line of Grafton Street and come up into Binley Road where it feeds on to the north-south urban motorway.”
He added: “The north-south motorway along the railway embankment will lead to the demolition of the vicarage in Binley Road. This plan virtually wipes out All Saints parish.”
The final wedding at All Saints took place on September 2nd,1967, and the church closed for the last time after an evening service on the same weekend. The church was demolished in 1971, with parts of the parish merging with St Anne’s in Acacia Avenue, and other parts merging with St Peter’s in Hillfields.
In the event, the feared road scheme did not materialise in quite the way it was first envisaged. Much of the original plan was later revised and it was not until the 1980s that Sky Blue Way was built – saving Far Gosford Street but still splitting the old All Saints parish. Buildings and streets to the south, including All Saints School and Bramble Street, also survived and the old school building still exists today as a nightclub. The north-south road took even longer to build and was not completed until 1997. It is now known as Jimmy Hill Way.
St Mark’s Church, meanwhile, also closed in the early 1970s and it too faced the threat of demolition. But it was saved by the NHS which turned the building into an Outpatients Department for Coventry and Warwickshire Hospital. Against all the odds, it re-opened as a church in 2017.
This article originally appeared in the June 2026 edition of Jabet’s Ash, the newsletter of Stoke Local History Group
