News

Illegal parking at Brittania Square has been stopped after campaigning by Coventry Society members and reporting by the Coventry Observer. The Coventry Society congratulates the City Council for taking action after illegal parking got out of hand in the square in front of the Brittania Hotel on the corner of Priory Street and Fairfax Street.… Read more: Council Stops Illegal Parking at the Britannia Hotel

Coventry City Council’s Cabinet have approved plans to modernise the city’s streetlights. The project will replace the lanterns on 29,500 lighting columns in the city with modern LED ones. The new lamps will use only half the energy of the current ones, and will last four times as long. It is also possible to dim… Read more: Street Lighting to be Modernised

Anyone who has visited Earlsdon recently will be fully aware that a number of properties on Earlsdon Street have stood empty for several or in some cases many months awaiting possible redevelopment, as shown on the right-hand side in the photograph below: Against this background of apparent stasis, however, at some point shortly after Christmas… Read more: Gone in an Instant, but not Forgotten …

Historian and CovSoc Committee member, David Fry, has been studying past editions of the Alfred Herbert Newsletter. These newsletters are much more than just a works newsletter and reveal a lot about the thinking in the city at the time they were written. The article below is extracted from 1956 editions of their Newsletter, looking… Read more: New Government and more new Coventry – 1950/51

The review of the Coventry Local Plan has taken another step forward this month. The Council’s Cabinet has given the go-ahead for public consultation on the revised plan. The consultation will take place between 15th January and 3rd March 2025. The consultation, which is known as a Regulation 19 consultation, is the final stage of… Read more: Local Plan Review Consultation

In this second article about Coventry’s cycle heritage, Peter James tells us about William Hillman. Peter writes…. William Hillman was born in Lewisham on 30th December 1847 the son of William a Cab master and his wife Mary Taylor. He was brought up at Lewis Grove in Lewisham with his five sisters. After moving to… Read more: The World’s largest manufacturer of cycles

Nobody could accuse the Government of not being busy this Christmas season! Since it took office in July we have had a plethora of announcements about planning, housing and local government policy. And these are now being crystalized into a raft of White Papers, regulations and policy consultations. Between 5th and 19th December this year… Read more: Government Christmas Presents for Planning

CovSoc Vice Chair, Peter Walters, tells us that in the late 80s / early 90s there was a tradition at the Coventry Evening Telegraph of publishing local ghost stories over the Christmas period. Here is one of the ones that Peter wrote at that time. The fog had lifted a little as the young couple… Read more: A Ghost Story for Christmas.

John Marshall of Stoke Local History Group tells the story of a former congregational chapel. In the 19th century the area we now call Ball Hill was little more than a small hamlet, sometimes known as Stoke Knob and noted for two distinctive features – a pub, which still exists, and a congregational chapel.The congregational… Read more: Whatever happened to Stoke’s chapel on the hill?

Historian and CovSoc member, Peter James, tells us the first part of a story about the development of the cycle industry in Coventry. Peter writes….. Born on 21st April 1830 in Albourne near Brighton in Sussex, James Starley was the son of Daniel Starley a farmer. When he was young and growing up on the… Read more: Father of the British Bicycle Industry