Coventry Audioguides

On the night of November 14, 1940, the Luftwaffe dropped 500 tons of bombs and 30,000 incendiary devices on Coventry in a raid designed to destroy the city's engineering and armaments factories. They succeeded in destroying most of the factories but also obliterated 4,330 homes and the medieval cathedral of St. Michael, leaving only its outer walls and spire standing. The German verb 'koventieren,' to obliterate a city entirely, entered the German language from this night. What the city chose to do with the ruins defined it more than the bombing itself: rather than demolish what remained, Coventry preserved the bombed shell as a memorial and built a new cathedral directly alongside it, connected by a porch, making forgiveness and reconciliation the deliberate architectural message.

Basil Spence's new Coventry Cathedral, consecrated in 1962, is one of the finest pieces of postwar British architecture, its interior filled with Graham Sutherland's enormous tapestry of Christ in Glory (the largest tapestry in the world at the time), John Piper's baptistry window of 195 panes of colored glass, and Jacob Epstein's bronze of St.

Michael defeating the Devil on the exterior wall. The city that built around this cathedral has a different character from its pre-war self: the bicycle industry that gave the world the modern safety bicycle in the 1880s has mostly moved on, but Coventry's engineering legacy continues in its electric vehicle sector and Warwick University, seven miles away, which has become one of Britain's strongest research universities.