Coventry: 13/04/23

 After walking through the wind yesterday morning I woke up with a bad case of windburn. The skin of my neck is red and chapped, I feel like I have been sandblasted, and even my eyelids hurt. There doesn't seem to be any blistering, but it's a scary confirmation of just how raw the weather was.

I had a good breakfast in the restaurant downstairs -- though they were out of black pudding -- and set out to look at Coventry. I was on my way to the museum and art gallery when I was sidetracked by seeing the canal basin at the top of the hill, across the ring road. Postwar Coventry is built with the centre of town inside a circular ring road, and pretty much all the residences outside. It probably makes the centre more pleasant and walkable, but there are times when it seems a bit lifeless.

Anyway, Coventry treats their canal a lot better than Oxford does. The canal basin is laid out nicely, with moorings for a dozen or so boats, of which two or three were occupied. There are shops and food outlets, and the canal path, as in Oxford, is paved and graded for the first part of its length. I followed it for a while, around a big bend and past some newish residential buildings and an impressive Victorian terrace with huge top-floor windows, which I assumed had been designed for artists to live in. But the houses ran out quickly, and it soon got bleak and depressing, so I returned to the road and headed back to the centre via Stoney Stanton Road.

There is a very prominent black and Asian presence here, though from the Middle East rather than China. Most of the people who are actually visible to the tourist, working outdoors or shopping, are of non-Anglo or mixed descent, and usually communicate in their own languages. There are no obvious conflicts, but I do wonder how the Britons of a few generations' time are going to regard all the stately homes and historical monuments rooted in someone else's culture. Because these things are expensive to set up and maintain.

I came back to the city centre on an overpass which brought me down into Lady Bertram's Garden, set up by an industrialist for his wife on some waste ground which incidentally contains the last remaining part of the old city wall -- most of it was pulled down by Charles II after the Civil War -- and a couple of city gates. The garden is nicely laid out, though quite small, but Lady Bertram died two days before it was finished. The rooms above the two remaining gates have been converted into short-term holiday accommodation for history buffs, rather like the buildings on Cockatoo Island.

Finally reached the museum at about eleven. Lots of kids inside, and the parents there seemed to be asking -- and answering -- more intelligent questions than the ones in Oxford. I began with the Peace and Reconciliation display, about the aftermath of the bombing rather than the bombing itself, then moved on to a room about Lady Godiva. Peeping Tom is apparently a later addition to the legend, possibly based on a painting which shows a man looking out of the window when Godiva rides by; but it's thought this was intended to be her husband. Anyway, the Victorians went mad over it all, and there is still a Godiva procession every year where a (clothed) woman rides through the streets on a white mare.

Upstairs is an indifferent art gallery, with pictures of mainly local scenes and dignitaries. Most of them badly need cleaning, and indeed all additions to the collections and the museum seem to have stopped in about 2007. There's some interesting sculpture, and a big room downstairs tracing the history of Coventry through its various industrial booms and busts. Current star of the museum is a big Diplodocus skeleton currently on loan from the London Natural History Museum, to whom it was given by Andrew Carnegie in 1905. It looks very impressive, though if you read the small print it becomes clear that it's only a plaster of paris replica of the original.

I came out intending to visit the Cathedral across the way next, but I felt like eating, so I found a Subway first, then decided to keep walking for a bit. My blister is improving, but still capable of giving me a twinge. There was a sign to 'Medieval Spon Street' which sounded interesting, though it took a bit of finding, but there were plenty of other impressive buildings to look at on the way. Even ordinary residential terraces here often seem to have been built on a monumental scale. 

Spon Street has been cut in half by the ring road, but most of the older buildings are in the central section. You can take the underpass to the outer half and see a few more; all still in use for various purposes, including one original pub. The Goons were very fond of using the word 'spon', but whether it originated here I don't know.

Coming back into town I discovered a brewery -- Dhillon's -- in an old chapel building. It was very impressive, but by this time it was getting cold, and I decided to postpone both that and my visit to the Cathedral, and head back to the hotel. Here I rinsed out some washing, had dinner, and fired up the BBC Iview player in order to watch a Frank Muir documentary from the Seventies on the brief history of the Ealing film studios. 'm still very red and sore, despite lots of moisturising. No rain today, at least.