Sunday Feature: How to Rebuild a City

How to Rebuild a City

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BBC Radio 3 - Sunday Feature, How to Rebuild a City

Dr Lisa Mullen tells the story of how postwar Coventry became the City of Tomorrow.

Dr Lisa Mullen finds out how blitzed Coventry became the City of Tomorrow. A testbed for architectural ideas, we uncover the choices that made it a symbol of postwar recovery.

Dr Lisa Mullen tells the story of the rebuilding of Coventry.

The blitzing of Coventry during the second world war laid waste to the city.  In its rebuilding, Coventry became a laboratory for new architectural ideas. It was a city of firsts – first ring road, first pedestrian precinct - and inspired urban development around the world.

The intriguing fact is that this vision was a pre-war idea.  It was dreamed up long before the bombs fell, when Coventry was a boomtown: the fastest growing city in the UK, headquarters of its most exciting industry – cars  – and was the best-preserved medieval city in the country.

It had a lot going for it. But as sociologists came to Coventry to study its prosperity, its radical council and its even more radical city architect dreamed up an extraordinary plan which would utterly transform the city. Medieval buildings would go. In their place: parkland, fountains, public art, and the clean lines of sophisticated, understated, modernist buildings. A unified plan for a modern age. The Labour council saw it as a statement of socialism – they were building a better life for all. 

In telling the story of how it was built, we meet one of the most extraordinary architects of the 20th century.  29-year-old Donald Gibson arrived in 1938. On his living room floor, his energetic team built their model of a dream city but realised this vision would mean bulldozing the city’s heritage.   We track Gibson’s battles with the authorities in his attempt to persuade them to reject the past and embrace his new ideas. 

In the end, the war provided the opportunity, as the city was largely destroyed in the blitz.  But there was still opposition, both within Coventry and in Whitehall. And it took all of Gibson’s considerable ingenuity to cajole, influence, and seize opportunities to transform Coventry into the City of Tomorrow.

The result was unique – architecture and art which was lauded and loved.  But, though designed as a utopia, the fall from grace was dramatic - its buildings have been derided in recent decades.  

Lisa Mullen tracks Gibson’s journey and asks what happened to that vision?  What went wrong in Coventry?

The answers are found in the city centre, where Dr Mullen talks to Professor Louise Campbell, Dr Otto Saumarez-Smith and Dr Sarah Walford from the University of Warwick;  Professor Adrian Smith from the University of Southampton, and Philip Hubbard Professor of Urban Studies at Kings College London. Plus Gerry McGovern and local historians Paul Maddocks and Roger Bailey.  And Jane Thomas, Gibson’s daughter.

Reader: Rupert Wickham 

Producers: Sara Conkey, Perminder Khatkar, Helen Lennard and Melvin Rickarby.

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