1/17 Coventry is UK City of Culture this year, so there will be a lot written about its built environment. A lot will be based on popular myth. A quick primer on what really happened to a city that in Tudor England ranked with Norwich & Bristol as the most important outside LDN

2/17 The city was until the 1900s (at least) thought of as one of the most picturesque and well-preserved in Britain. In the 1870s Henry James ranked it alongside York and Shrewsbury; the 1876 guide "in our country" ranked its 16th & 17thC architecture first after Chester.

3/17 Coventry was already changing, though, as it was becoming a centre for the new engineering industries... While JB Priestley, in his 1930s English Journey, describes it as "genuinely old and picturesque" and full of "soaring wood and carved stone"....

4/17 He goes on to say "these picturesque remains of the old Coventry are besieged by an army of nuts, bolts, hammers, spanners, gauges, drills and machine lathes - in a thick ring round the ancient centre are the factories, the machine tool makers, the electrical companies..."

5/17 Indeed City Engineer Ernest Ford already had plans to make the city more suitable for the cars that were now being made there. Shortly after Priestley's visit, and several years before the famous bombing, his plans were put into action.

6/17 The heart of medieval Coventry - Butcher and Ironmonger Rows, the Bull Ring, St Agnes Lane, among others - was swept away by the city council, without any help from the luftwaffe, to build two new, wide roads: Corporation Street and Trinity Street.

7/17 It is no surprise that Coventry was targeted in the war. It had a concentration of armaments factories, all close to the medieval centre.

8/17 The Nazis had also begun to see bombing attacks on the Midlands, as home of the "physical wealth of British capitalism" (ct. the intangible wealth of the City of London) as well as "conservative, stubborn-stour Englishness", as an alternative way to break the national spirit

9/17 The bombing was horrific, killed over 550 people, and destroyed many buildings - including, uniquely for a British city, the cathedral. But it was not flattened, as Dresden or Hamburg would be later in the war - raids that each killed at least 25,000 people.

10/17 However it was in everyone's interest to exagerrate the scale of the attack. The Germans coined a new word 'coventrieren', to devastate a city by aerial bombardment, as part of their boasts about the bombing.

11/17 Meanwhile, the Allies portrayed Coventry as a city 'martyred' to the inhuman horrors of Nazi warfare. They emphasised the destruction of the cathedral - but also painted the city as a medieval gem, as if Ford's clearances and road schemes had not happened.

12/17 IThis was all used to both justify later raids on German cities and the post-war redevelopment. Plans for this has been put in place before the war, and one protagonist remembers looking out over the bombed city and thinking how much easier it would be for them to proceed

13/17 This was Donald Gibson, appointed City Architect in 1938. While Ford had had a plan that would keep some of the hundreds of medieval buildings that, contrary to received wisdom, had survived the war. Gibson was more radical, ignoring the survivals and the street plan.

14/17 Gibson would prevail, and most of these surviving buildlings would be demolished, including whole streets such as Little Park Street, Gosford Street and Little Palace Yard (pictured, survived until the 1960s).

15/17 A newspaper report from the time reports piles of medieval timbers burning in the streets, a "demolition that recalls the days of the blitz". A last-ditch conservation effort saw some buildings saved and moved to an ersatz historical quarter at Spon Street.

16/17 Coventry's post-war development is important and impressive architecturally. It needs to be seen as a vital symbol of national rebirth. Together with Coventry's post-war growth and industrial affluence, it is easy to understand why this all happened.

17/17 But let's not pretend that the bombing produced a tabula rasa, on which a new Coventry had to be built. The real story of the emergence of what is now an almost entirely 20th C. city is rather more complex.

If you're interested in reading more, check out the chapter on Coventry in Britain's Lost Cities by Gavin Stamp or the article 'Relocating Medieval Coventry' in Twentieth Century Architecture. Or the reconstruction of the pre-war city at http://www.coventryrebuilt.com/films/ 

It’s worth adding that within a week of the Coventry bombing there were two raids on Birmingham that in combination actually killed more people and damaged more buildings.