Spirit of place: Coventry, & some thoughts on modernism

To Coventry today. I have somewhat mixed feelings about Coventry in one way or another. Perhaps I had better declare right from the start that not the least reason for this is that the love of my life lives in Coventry. This is an unrequited love; perhaps it says so much about me that he is straight, as are all the best men. (When I rarely get one of them into bed I lose interest because he ceases to be a real man).
Be that as it may, Coventry is proverbial as the place to which you send someone if you're not on speaking terms. It also has a reputation for the most comprehensive post-World War 2 rebuilding & for its cathedral.
But more important for the spirit of place, what does it feel like? Well it felt different this time to previous visits. This may be because I personally am in a different place but it felt more friendly, less desperate. The bedrock of feeling is obviously its ancient heritage: you walk out of a 1960s shopping centre into a street of timber-framed houses. There is a genuine feeling of disconnectuon between the elements, a feeling that violence has been done to the spirit of place, that it has not developed organically in the way Worcester has.
I don't like the cathedral - Guildford beats it hands down as a modern cathedral, in my opinion. The whole ethos of 'forgive us' makes me uncomfortable, I feel it leads to the over-reconstruction of past wrongs, accentuated by the building of a new cathedral rather than the reconstruction of the old. The sculpture is Epstein's 'Ecce Homo,' representing Jesus before Pontius Pilate: these Christians are obsessed with binding, holding, controlling & being controlled. They even dwell on the torture & death of their God! It must also be horrendously expensive to keep a ruin at just that stage of decay. Rebuild it or let it fall down is my cry!
Coventry's sixties architecture has a bad reputation but I must admit to liking it. Getting off the train at the railway station reminds me of the opening scenes of the 60s TV programme Danger Man. And the reason Coventry's 60s architecture doesn't look too bad is that it has been looked after, not neglected like Birmingham's. It is important to remember that after World War II there was genuinely a feeling abroad of a new world. We can look on the benign paternalism of 60s planning as doomed in retrospect, but at least they were willing to have a go! If only they could have borne in mind the cyclical nature of history, that there is never genuinely a final war or a final cityscape: each generation adds and takes away, & I feel that this is the real enduring message of the modernist movement.
And finally I can't resist including a picture of the devil's willy from the new cathedral!
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