‘I dreamt of Coventry & thought of you’.

I’m an outsider, a visitor. I have travelled from Ramsgate in Kent. I’m excited to be in this city on the eve of its City of Culture celebrations. What a fascinating place to find myself, particularly surreal during a pandemic and national lockdown. Masterful post-war civic planning, frankly gobsmacking - full of hope, ambition & local sensitivity. Stand-alone or clustered groups of medieval buildings anchor streets in time, otherwise razed to the ground by bombing. Ruins create oddly framed views, striking vistas and jarring juxtapositions of buildings from a haphazard & jumbled timeline - jolted from century to century within a few footsteps - I've become time traveller! ‘Contemporary Bland’ adjacent to a medieval masterpiece. A visionary civic ceremonial vista blocked by an inward looking 1980's carbuncle – how was that ever a good idea. Cathedral Lanes - quite possibly the most offensively bad building in Coventry.

A community spirited & very friendly circular central market absolutely made my day. Neat rows of caulis & cabbages, vibrant African fabric, a giant spliff. Walking the back streets, always insightful, reading the housing stock for signs of Victorian topshops, ribbons, looms, domestic factories - the sounds of history buzzing in my head. A University Library, surely channelling San Gimignano. An armoured Elephant disguised as a swimming baths. The Britannia Hotel, a bold and ugly jarring brutalism spanning the ring road - an ever-tightening concrete corsetry of cars & lorries encircling the City’s heart. 

I’m Coventry curious – something different at every turn. Coventry Cathedral (1962) boasts a Who’s Who of a vibrant & international 1960’s art world. These city fathers & mothers had a thing for commissioning public art & architecture of the highest quality. A masterstroke. Genius. Sir Basil Spence ensured that artists were commissioned early in the project to prevent them being engineered out. Public art was also commissioned as an integral part of the urban landscape – a lot of it may have been moved or relocated – it may not be in the best condition, but it has survived and now is the very time to celebrate that vision and trust in creativity as a catalyst for change once again.

The University had its roots in a College of Design founded in 1843 to provide designers for the ribbon manufactory. Without artists, designers and creative entrepreneurs, this city would not have thrived. Medieval Coventry boasted perhaps the greatest & most innovative glass painter of his time, John Thornton (1405-1433) who had his studios at The Burges -

Industrialists, inventors, thinkers, philosophers & manufacturers stoked the fires of industry here in Coventry. Precision engineering & machine tools from here shaped the world. Alfred Herbert's Coventry Die-Head was known worldwide. Tangential spokes were invented here in 1874 by James Starley. The birth of the bicycle. Differential gears. Edward O'Brien on Foleshill Road was 'the world's largest cycle dealer'. John & James Cash, Charles Bray, Eli Green, James Starley, John Kemp Starley, all names synonymous with Coventry.

I made my first visit on 18th December 2020 - the day before Kent went into Tier 4 lockdown - my next visit during full lockdown on 20th February 2021. Few people around, even less traffic. I made a walking circuit of the city skirting either side of the ring road. I criss-crossed the centre and then walked to the War Memorial and found exotic birds painted giant-size. Colourful, cheery, chirpy!

The geometry of Coventry inspires me - octagonal spires atop octagonal towers, atop rectangular boxes. Circles for markets, circles for chapels, 10 pointed stars. Emphatic vertical planes, powerful horizontal lines, cross-section columns - humongous rectilinear retail sheds, an armoured origami elephant, perfect ceremonial civic symmetry down the precinct, brutal textured concrete rectangles. A shimmering blue circle, exploded hexagons, irregular rectangles in cast aluminium. All this and a true-blue and mostly invisible river run through it. Locarno Dance Hall 1958-60 a glazed box stairway access.

Coventry boasts two famous tapestries - both purpose-made & still in-situ. One, almost 60 years old & the largest in the world, the other 500 years old & still hung exactly where it was commissioned for! A true survivor and perhaps unheralded, one of the most precious artefacts in Coventry. A supa nova Baptistry Window by John Piper. Half-timbered Tudor to topshop triangles. Machine-gun factory to postwar Modernism. Generic shopping globalism is now in danger of swamping the very human scale of the city. Big money is as ever, all sharp elbows and tone deaf. Surely worth a review?

I have been commissioned by Creative Giants Art Ltd for client Coventry City Council, Coventry City of Culture Trust & their partners Avanti West Coast to create a new artwork which responds to the City & which will be installed on the architectural glazed screens of the two storey height booking hall at Coventry Station. The streamlined modernist Station was built in 1962 and is Grade II Listed. Described by Historic England as "Outstanding architecturally, particularly for its spatial qualities and detailing". The new artwork will be manufactured & installed in collaboration with VGL. Digitally printed onto optically clear vinyl, the installation will respect the architecture of the building, maintaining clear views of the interior. The project is part of the Coventry Station Masterplan, currently underway adjacent to the Station and I am excited to be a part of the Coventry City of Culture 2021 celebrations.

I must say a few words about how I go about my creative practice and how this evolves into the artwork you may soon see. What is it I do all day? Some explanation as to how artwork like this 'suddenly' appears, as if overnight. My work is site-specific, it is conceived, nurtured & created in and about the space for which it has been commissioned, in this case the Ticket Hall of Coventry Station. It is a wholly contextual response to place, which involves local research, on foot, walking the streets, looking, thinking and documenting, snatched views, getting lost, getting tired, making sketchbooks and writing – my curiously creative site analysis – combined with research in archives, museums as well as engagement and collaboration with as many interested parties as I can manage.

Ordinarily, & put simply, it means I travel from my home in Ramsgate to wherever the project is & engage with it as much as possible thereafter until the job is done. I describe it as an immersive process, the end product can only come because of that partisan and site-specific work. This is how I have worked for thirty years. Being commissioned during a national lockdown brought some challenges to this usual practice, it promised to mess up my way of doing things, I thought it might prove difficult - but hey, how wrong was I!

Coventry is of course a step ahead, and full of surprises - a rather brilliant set of online resources, centred around the Herbert Gallery & Museum – such as Coventry Digital & Coventry Atlas – The Coventry Society Transport Museum. Behind these institutional walls are passionate individuals, happy to share their experience and knowledge, people who know & love the city, people prepared to help by offering up all manner of insights. My two visits were 6 weeks apart. Both times I visited Coventry Cathedral. On both visits I was greeted and welcomed by the same Cathedral guide. On my second visit she remembered me, where I had come from and what we had talked about on my previous visit. Instagram has also been a great source of support & insight, I am grateful to a number of individuals in whose Insta footsteps I follow – whose unique visions and perspectives of Coventry and their home city I get to see first-hand for myself, framed through their eyes and emotions. This being the Coventry City of Culture year there is no lack of opportune and fascinating ‘windows’ and voices into Coventry life and times – Coventry City of Culture 2021 has been fantastic resource, a moveable feast with something new almost daily. I also have to mention two of my stalwart go-to national resources too, the National Library of Scotland Maps collection and Britain from Above, both phenomenal and informative collections.

I am tuning in and absorbing as much as possible. Through the static and buzz, some things communicate sharply with clarity and in full colour - a detail perhaps, a whole building, a sound overheard, an old map, a black & white image, a comment overheard, someone’s clothes, a beautiful display of vegetables in the central market, a worn bit of stonework, a tree. It is eclectic, it comes from everywhere. It times travels. Coventry comes in all shapes and sizes. These remembered landscapes of place, these juxtapositions of random elements, are gradually distilled into my response to the city.

The only downside is that the streets have been very quiet on my visits. The people are missing from the equation. Cultural venues & most retail closed. The vibrancy, colour and buzz of street life in a multi-cultured and diverse city curtailed – I am so looking forward to a visit sometime soon to an open, bustling, noisy Coventry. I really must experience this first-hand. This is after all a partnership project.

Forever Coventry curious.