David Porter notes the passing of a building with a significant history. David writes …
In my role as a volunteer at the City Archives, I have often found myself engaged in the process of scanning and cataloguing photographs of buildings when they were undergoing construction or repair in Coventry City Centre, some of which buildings on my way back home I see in the process of being demolished.
As a case in point, I stopped to take the picture above having previously come across the following photograph in the City Engineers records, which if necessary might help those who need a clue in recognising what the building above used to be:
Through the arch on the far side of Warwick Row, The Reform Club is visible with the Benleys store and restaurant to its right. The Reform Club building is still with us today but Benleys closed not long after this photograph was taken, to be replaced by a number of retail ventures before in 1999 it became a pub called The Litten Tree – it is of course the remains of this building which appear in the first photograph above.
It is sad to see this building disappear before our eyes, in large part because it played an important part in the twentieth-century history of the city. This contribution began shortly before the First World War, when as will already be familiar to most the Rover Company built a new car showroom here to help market the vehicles which it produced in its extensive Meteor works to the rear of the premises.
During the Second World War, the building Rover had built was requisitioned and used for a variety of purposes some of which may be less well known, such as on the ground floor the distribution of ration cards to the inhabitants of Coventry. On the upper floors, other important work was undertaken, as described in a reminiscence written by Coventry-born Harry Weston – the one-time Lord Mayor of Coventry – which is reproduced in part here:
It is striking to learn, by the way, that Weston omitted to mention that one of the houses destroyed in the 1940 bombing raid was in fact his own, but for our purposes it is perhaps more significant to note that the former Rover showroom was the location for the offices used by Donald Gibson and his team to plan the redevelopment of Coventry in the post-war era, which might make the fact that this building itself is now being demolished seem somewhat ironic.
In closing, as reported in a Coventry Society article (https://www.coventrysociety.org.uk/public-art-in-coventry/tennant-people-of-coventry/), Donald Gibson set out in a letter dated 1977 some of his misgivings over subsequent changes to his original plans for the city centre.
However, perhaps he would not have been too disappointed to learn of the former Rover showroom as in spite of these concerns in the conclusion to his letter Gibson remarked philosophically that: “Each generation must solve its own problems”.
Postscript
For a historical overview, see the excellent ten-minute video produced by Alan Denyer who was himself responsible for the final chapter in the story of this building, repurposing it as a centre for Coventry artists: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lsbMI_uEozY