Coventry Audio Tour: Hands to the Work

Coventry's spires and ruins belong to history. The streets between them belong to a different city — the narrow-loom weavers who lived and worked in the same three rooms, the dyers who produced a blue famed across Europe, the watchmakers who crowded Spon Street with their outworkers and their jewelling benches, the guild drapers and merchants who built almshouses for the elderly poor, the medieval craftsmen who staged mystery plays on wagons through the streets as an act of both worship and civic glory, the friars who put their names to a surrender document, the ward watchmen who rotated civic duty by trade, the cyclists and motor workers who made Coventry the workshop of the modern world, and Jock Forbes the cathedral stonemason who walked the roof on the worst night in Coventry's history and made a cross from the charred beams. This is the city that wove, wound, built and forgave.