Celebrating Coventry's Literary Heritage

The Guardian has a nice piece puffing a poetry event celebrating Coventry's "iconic" ring road. An unusual subject, I'll give you that, but if you had to sum up Coventry in terms of one structure the ring road would give the Cathedral a run for its money.  It also costs less to see now that the Cathedral has started to charge visitors six pounds a pop (in the post Christian age isn't it time for Cathedrals to be be declared national museums? The  John Piper windows and Graham Sutherland tapestry could be treated as part of the national art collection).

Coventry has never been particularly good at drawing its literary heritage to the attention of its citizens. Certainly my 18 year old self was unaware that it was the birth-place of Philip Larkin - the family home was demolished to make way for the ring road - and Cyril Connolly (who he? I would have said). Completely inexplicable was the neglect of a rather fine house (now a Bangladeshi cultural centre) in the Foleshill district that George Eliot lived in for nearly 10 years. As far as I know there wasn't even a plaque on the wall to mark the site.  It never seemed to occur to the city fathers that, if most of what you had has been destroyed you should perhaps make the best of what is left.

 We don't need to invent roots, just pay attention to the ones that survive.