The ultimate insider's guide to Coventry
Features interesting and unusual places not found in traditional travel guides
Part of the international 111 Places/111 Shops series with over 650 titles and 3.8 million copies in print worldwide
Appeals to both the local market (more than 325,000 people call Coventry home) and the tourist market (more than 590,000 people visit Coventry every year!)
Fully illustrated with 111 full-page colour photographs
The city is a rich tapestry, home to native Coventrians and newcomers of every nationality and ethnicity. But behind the modernity, Coventry's storied past lives on in its architecture and artworks, its visionary centre and outlying council estates.
This book reveals some of its hard-to-find origins as a city with a major medieval influence, and the relics of its industrial boom as a centre for making cloth and clocks, cars and bikes. But it was manufacturing munitions that made it a target for the German Luftwaffe in WWII, flattening its medieval heart, and prompting the distinctive look and feel of its centre and surrounds today.
It details everything from a quirky homage to 11th-century Lady Godiva, to the remnants of the walled city of the English Civil War that spawned the phrase 'sent to Coventry'. From the remnants of the ruined cathedral to the boho Fargo village, from the origins of the influential Two-Tone music style born here, to the impact of UK City of Culture 2021 status, it's all uncovered inside.
This unusual guidebook invites the inquisitive to head off the beaten track and explore many of the city's lesser-known places.