A grim & bleak beauty

On architecture and art in Coventry

by Anthony Daniels

I pray you, let us satisfy our eyes With the memorials and the things of fame That do renown this city.                                 —William Shakespeare, Twelfth Night

On the night of November 14, 1940, the ancient city of Coventry was firebombed and one of the finest assemblages of medieval buildings in Europe vanished. The following morning, the Provost of the Cathedral, the Very Reverend Richard Howard, traced the words “Father forgive” on the charred surface of the ruined walls of the fifteenth-century cathedral, and vowed that there would be no revenge or retaliation. He counted neither on Bomber Harris nor on post-war British architects.

The latter, in particular, have now fully revenged themselves upon a past that they cannot emulate, approach, or equal, much less surpass, an incapacity more evident in Coventry than anywhere else known to me. The city is now a festival, an orgy, a bacchanalia of British architectural and town-planning incompetence, inhumanity, brutality, bad taste, and the ideological espousal of the ugly, no doubt with a good dose of municipal corruption thrown in. Modern Coventry is to the eye what an abattoir is to the nose, and no person of the most minimal aesthetic sensibility could be other than horrified by the inhuman design and execution of the rebuilt city, in which cars race along highways raised on concrete pillars between dilapidated Le Corbusian-blocks, while mere humans are relegated to filthy and cold subterranean passages and shopping precincts where muggers and rapists may (and do) safely lurk.

The ugliness is all the more distressing because of the great beauty of the little that remains of the ancient city, within a stone’s throw of Sir Basil Spence’s semi-brutalist replacement cathedral: the contrast acts like a nagging pain that does not incapacitate but cannot be ignored. A few half-timbered or stone buildings of the fifteenth-century remain, the English Perpendicular church of Holy Trinity from the same century, two large houses of a heartbreaking elegance from the early eighteenth century, and some later Georgian buildings of classical perfection. Even the Victorian contribution still stands (though assiduously ruined by modern addition, in what might properly be called architectural rape) is harmonious and in keeping with what existed before, or at least not offensive to the spirit of place.

I was in Coventry for the week, for a murder trial. Murder is generally sordid, but murders in Coventry are also banal, psychologically suited to its dispiriting housing projects: they (the murders) do not rise to the level of reportability in newspapers. And both for economic reasons, and to absorb the full flavor of the city, I stayed for the duration in an hotel of rapidly dilapidating concrete that strongly resembled the hotels of Soviet or East European steel towns in the 1970s. Of course it was run with that slovenly inattention to detail, complete absence of pride, and unconsciousness of anything being wrong that one expects from British service industries; it is nowadays almost impossible to run any enterprise in Britain properly without foreigners, preferably employed from top to bottom.

It would be misleading, however, to say that my time in Coventry was wretched or wasted; very far from it. English trials for murder are still by far the best, most dramatic entertainment in the world, completely free to spectators, though—being scrupulously fair to the accused—they require intelligence and powers of concentration to follow, so that their understated orsotto voce turning points may be properly appreciated for what they are. And I also had interesting encounters in Coventry that reassured me that not quite all in our civilization is lost.

One lunchtime, I walked round the small remaining ancient quarter and stood to read the plaque on the wall of the County Hall, built in 1783–4, and deemed by the plaque’s author to be “the only remaining 18th Century public building of architectural distinction.” (A bit rich that, I thought, considering that a single eighteenth-century brick is highly distinguished by comparison with all that has been built in the last sixty-five years.)

The plaque informed pedestrians that the hall served for a time as the home of the governor of the nearby prison, and that “the last public execution to take place in Coventry was in the street outside the County Hall (Cuckoo Lane) in 1849.”

While I was taking this down in a notebook, a building worker emerged for a smoke from the hall, which was undergoing restoration. He asked me why I was copying down the inscription on the plaque, and I told him, adding that I was in favor of the reinstitution of public executions in Cuckoo Lane, but only for British architects. He laughed and said that he was agreed. Hang them all.

We started to talk of the horrors of modern British architecture: buildings that would never age but only deteriorate from the very moment of their completion, if not before (the cladding of the hideous chapter house of the cathedral was already falling off; passers-by were warned not to approach too near). Looking across at some of the lovely Georgian terraced houses visible from the hall, I remarked that modern British architects are incapable of even getting the simple proportions of windows in houses right, and to my surprise the building worker spoke of the golden section. He told me that all skilled workers such as himself detested what they were required to build, knowing it to be the gimcrack rubbish that it is, but, like most of the public, they had no say in the matter.

The County Hall, he told me, a building of simplicity and grandeur without pomposity or overbearing size, was under restoration because Coventry—God help the foreign visitors!—was playing host to some Olympic event or other. It was necessary to try to deceive them somehow. The beautiful cobbling of a few streets had been restored for the same reason. And though a man of a good temper, he added, “They wouldn’t have done it for any other reason,” thus expressing his justified contempt for a vast and catastrophically expensive and unprofitable demotic festival that a politician with brains of tinsel, Anthony Blair, had worked so hard to bequeath us, the taxpayers.

Is it a good or a bad thing that a skilled building-worker should be of much higher caliber than a prime minister?

Another lunchtime I walked into the Herbert Art Gallery, named after its founding philanthropic industrialist (of the kind upon whose like we shall never look again, for lack of industry). I confess that I went more in the hope of finding something to eat other than the refried food whose smell permeated the streets at lunchtime than for anything worthwhile to see, for if there is one aspect of modern museumology that unequivocally represents progress, it is the catering arrangements. I was not disappointed: the small and, no doubt, besieged band of quiche- and salad-eaters in Coventry was there.

But more surprising, to me at least, was the museum itself. The historical section contained not only George Eliot’s Broadwood piano and writing desk (she lived in Coventry for a time, and Nuneaton is not far away), but also a fascinating and moving permanent exhibition of the centuries-old, and very glorious, history of industry in the city, from the production of luxury cloth in mediaeval times to the jet engine in modern. In the Fifties and Sixties, 50,000 people worked in the car industry in Coventry; I suspect, alas, that now more are employed.

In the galleries of the museum was a temporary exhibition with the unpromising name “I woz ere,” by George Shaw, an artist who grew up in Coventry in the Seventies and Eighties, though he has now moved away, and whose work was nominated for the Turner Prize which, by any reasonable criteria, it should have won.

The exhibition was among the most powerful by any living artist that I have ever seen; the work was both accessible and complex, evoking anger, pity, melancholy, and aesthetic pleasure at the same time, a confusion of sentiment that is mirrored by life itself. Of how much contemporary art can this be said?

Shaw has painted, with an unmistakable intensity of feeling, not to say passion, scenes in the suburban area of Coventry in which he grew up, Tile Hill: though such is the abominable desolation that is modern British urbanism that, to anyone but an expert in the residential districts of the city, there is nothing to distinguish it from many other areas of Coventry, or, indeed, from those of hundreds of other towns or cities in Britain. The very featureless indistinguishability of the area—the natural result of “rational” utilitarian planning in an age of complete failure of taste, of high labor costs, of a puritanical disdain (for fear of committing kitsch, a fear that is itself is symptomatic of the fearful person’s complete loss of confidence in his ability to make an aesthetic judgment) of anything to humanize or soften a right-angle, a large pane of glass or a plain unadorned surface of brick or concrete, and of an unpreparedness to sacrifice the slightest animal comfort for the sake of physical beauty—is Shaw’s subject. There is no sign of activity nor of human figures populating Shaws’s pictures, though he is depicting a residential area; one cannot help but think of Betjeman’s famous couplet:

Come, friendly bombs, and fall on Slough!
It is not fit for humans now.

And yet, despite the profound sense of spiritual, social, cultural, and aesthetic vacuity that the pictures convey, almost physically sinking the heart deep into one’s abdomen, they are also strangely uplifting. The artist is a very accomplished one; even when he paints a row of brick garages, some of their metal doors absent or smashed off their hinges by vandals, with littered scrubland nearby, the light and the composition more than compensate for the inspissated hideousness of what is shown, and beauty emerges. Metal panels or blanked-out windows, disfigured (if you can disfigure what is already hellish) by graffiti or daubs of paint that look like dripping blood, become objects of contemplation and—yes—pleasure. He paints leafless trees in the midst of suburban lifelessness against skies that make you think of Atkinson Grimshaw. The poignancy is not unbearable, exactly, but it stops the heart.

Shaw’s paintings reveal a world in which nothing intervenes between the purely and intensely private on the one hand—the box-like featureless houses—and the state or municipal on the other. Everything is planned, everything compartmentalized, nothing spontaneous. You are either in your house, shut off from everyone else, like a bacterium in a Petri dish, or in the realm of the public sector. Perhaps the acme of this infernal dialectic, The Back of the Social Club, a view across an expanse of asphalt of a large, flat concrete slab building with a truly Corbusian concrete outer staircase, the concrete walls stained by weeping pollution, the blank wall interrupted only by sheets of unreflecting black glass. To the right of the building as you look at it is a very pleasant copse of trees: here is a world in which every prospect is vile, and only nature pleases.

A social club without sign of life: indeed, from which the very possibility of any sign of life has been expressly excluded by its design! Here indeed is a subject for meditation; for many men, not deficient in intelligence, at least not in the formal sense, have conspired to produce this abomination, this absurdity that makes you exclaim “Ha!” though not with any mirth, only with contempt and puzzlement that such an inhuman bunker could ever have been constructed at all, let alone as a social club. What depths of aesthetic depravity, of contempt for actual humans masquerading as concern for them!

And yet the picture is beautiful, thanks to the light, the composition, the execution, and somehow one is almost reconciled to it, grateful that the horror existed so that George Shaw should have painted it.

The nostalgia for his own past also is evident in the artist’s pictures, but I do not think he could be accused of prettifying the ugly, and thereby of disarming criticism of it. He makes us rejoice and despair at the same time; he somehow manages the trick of making the ugly beautiful and the banal extraordinary, without denial of the ugliness or the banality. This is an achievement worthy of salutation.

Praise is also due to the way he has made art of high merit accessible to ordinary people, whose comments I read (as is my habit) in the comment book left by the gallery for visitors. Many whom I suspect are normally not much interested in art, and who live in places such as Tile Hill, were touched by the power of art, perhaps for the first time. One comment in particular moved me:

Having had my childhood in Coventry (moved away 1989), this exhibition captures for me a kind of grim, bleak nostalgia and emptiness I feel when I return.

Not even British architects of the twentieth century, then, can entirely destroy the human spirit or crush human sensibility, try as they might. I could not help but think back to the tomb of Dr. Philemon Holland, the grammarian and translator, who died in February 1637, in his eighty-fifth year, in Coventry, and wrote his own epitaph:

Here dwelleth noman. Noman? Stranger welcome. Philemon Holland rests duly buried in this ground. If you ask what is the import of his name, it is this: I was all earth and all earth I shall be. . . . My aged Muse rests in her place. Do you notice? Let her be buried with me in my coffin. Farewell.

When I told friends that I was staying a few days in Coventry, they stood amazed, such is its reputation. They would not have been surprised if I had proposed to go to the interior of Borneo, or bicycle in the Sahara— but Coventry? I come away with my prejudice confirmed: everywhere is interesting.