Distance: 3.8 miles
Difficulty of the terrain: easy
Get the route via: Ordnance Survey Maps or download the GPX. file from Dropbox
Walk from Coventry’s outer-suburbs, across a lot of green space, including the valley of the River Stour, into Coventry’s ancient urban heart.
The Story
The Walk
Getting Back
The Walls That Defied A King
Having developed as a significant religious and political centre during the early middle ages, during the 14th and 15th Centuries Coventry became a major centre of trade, textile manufacture and early mechanical engineering.
Far eclipsing Lincoln, which for much of the Middle Ages was the Midlands premier city, as well as ecclesiastical centres like Lichfield, Worcester and Hereford, as well as seats of royal power like Nottingham, Coventry with a population of at least 10,000 during this period was almost as big as York and Bristol.
This status was recognised in 1454 when the city was detached from Warwickshire and became a county in its own right. A situation which prevailed until 1842, by which time Coventry was still important, but no longer one of the largest cities in the country.
During the middle ages like other major British cities during the period Coventry constructed a set of city walls. As well as being a means of defence in the – usually infrequent – instance when the city could face attack, the walls also served an important civic purpose, stating the power, authority, and order keeping prowess of the city’s administration.
Over the centuries suburbs like Spon End and Gosford, which today form part of Coventry’s inner-city, grew up outside the walls, and indeed the city’s authority stretched further encompassing woodland, commons and farmland as far as Tile Hill and Stoneleigh. Despite them demarking only part of the city’s patrimony the walls retained their great significance for the city throughout the first century of the early modern period.
During the 17th Century Civil Wars Coventry, perhaps due to its interconnectedness within Britain and abroad, status as a trading hub and a centre for industry, in common with smaller manufacturing towns to its west like Birmingham, was strongly for the Parliamentary cause.
This was clear right at the war’s start in August 1642, before the first battle of the conflict at Edgehill further south in Warwickshire. On the 19th of that month Charles I having left London, arrived outside Coventry with an army 6,000 strong. His demand was that the city admitted him and 800 of his most senior followers.
The city’s leaders were mindful they did not want the burden of extending hospitality the king and 800 of his followers, especially while thousands of rank and file soldiers were camped in their hinterland, did not want to do this. Instead the Lord Mayor suggested that they would receive the king and 200 of his followers.
Charles I was displeased by this and decided to lay siege to the city. For two days the king’s army bombarded Coventry and its walls with cannon looking to blow holes through which they could attack and try to take the city. The city’s official account claims that this was futile and very little damage was done to the walls or the city they sheltered. While another, by a John Vicars, claims that damage was done and a large hole was blown in the walls, but townspeople rushed to defend the breach and succeeded in stopping the soldiers from entering.
Either way, after a short siege the king stopped his assault, gave up, and retreated from Coventry.
Throughout the rest of the wars which continued with varying degrees of intensity until the future Charles II’s defeat at Worcester in 1651 (and subsequent flight to France via an oak tree on the Shropshire/Staffordshire boundary line) Coventry was not troubled by royalist armies again.
However, extensive military preparations was undertaken by the civic authorities to strengthen their defences, including demolishing suburban houses to create clear space for their defenders to shoot at people approaching the walls, filling in nearby quarries to stop enemy soldiers hiding there, and instituting a guard that purportedly ensured that four hundred people were guarding the wall against attackers at any time.
Indeed, with a consistent garrison of more than a thousand Parliamentarian soldiers, Coventry was a major military centre for that side of the civil conflict. Very important in a region which was heavily contested throughout the war. For this reason it became somewhere that Royalist prisoners of war were detained, most famously Scots immediately after Charles I’s failed attempt in 1647 to take back his throne in confederation with them. It is said that the term “sent to Coventry” for giving someone the cold shoulder comes from this practice.
Coventry’s defiance and identity as a bastion of support for parliament against the crown was not forgotten. In 1662, now installed as Charles II, Britain’s new king did not forget Coventry’s stand against his father 20 years earlier. That year he decreed that Coventry’s walls be torn down. This decree is often cited as a direct act of vengeance, and it may have been, however, in the actual text of the decree the king and his agents explicitly cited concerns that Coventry may shelter dissidents or insurrectionists in future.
Politics of course is a fickle game and an issue which is a blazingly hot topic at one time may be of little consequence at all to later generations. Sometimes these shifts occur disarmingly quickly. In some regards moving on from the 17th Century Civil Wars – in England at least – was like this. In 1672 the decree to demolish Coventry’s city walls was rescinded. By this time little was left, the walls having been a popular material for Coventry people and others to take away as building material. The revocation of the decree led to measures being put in place to stop further removal of material which had comprised the city’s walls. In 1686, less than half a century after the walls withstood the siege of Coventry the city council put in place the first ordinance to conserve what was left of the city’s walls. Even in their ruinous condition they remained an important civic symbol.
These days a few portions of Coventry’s ancient city walls remain. The largest visible sections are near to Pool Meadow Bus Station and Coventry Transport Museum. The Cook Street Gate and the Swanswell Gate survive in this part of the city. Several years ago around the time of Coventry’s year as City of Culture in 2021 they were restored and reopened as holiday lettings by Historic Coventry Trust. Meaning that they provide shelter once more, but this time encouraging people into the heart of the city rather than keeping them out.
The Walk
Get the route: via Ordnance Survey Maps or download the GPX. file from Dropbox
I create the Walk Midlands routes via Ordnance Survey Maps Explor
This walk from Binley, a former mining village on the south eastern edge of Coventry, to the city centre begins from the bus stop just down from the Miner’s Arm pub and the Sowe Valley Primary School.
The Miner’s Arms is a well maintained 1960s flat roofed pub, its name a nod to Binley’s colliery heritage.
Upon alighting the bus. Turn and head down hill past the pub and the school.
Here, cross the road and turn right, walking along the pavement.
Soon just after passing a 1960s vintage Roman Catholic church, social club and school turn left onto a foot and cycle path.
Presently this track runs straight ahead across a large grassy park which is part of the River Sowe floodplain.
Continue along this path approaching the river itself, which you cross.
Just after crossing the river the path runs up a short slope. Here there is an underpass straight on the right running beneath the A4082 which you pass through.
On the far side of the underpass follow the path uphill to the left towards a set of mid-20th Century flats.
At the top of the hill on the right there is a snicket which you walk through into the Stoke Aldermoor estate.
Once on the estate turn left, picking up one of the main roads running through this residential area.
Continue straight ahead along this road walking through Stoke Aldermoor.
As you walk the mid-20th Century flats, maisonettes and houses giveaway to interwar era council houses.
Presently after walking for some distance you reach a junction. Here there are recently built private houses on the far side of the road.
At this junction turn left and walk along the road past the new estate.
Soon you reach another junction where you turn right walking up a slight incline still walking through the new estate.
On the edge of the new estate there is a junction where you turn left.
Soon you pass beneath a heavily oxidised former railway bridge, which still has traces of a railway company crest on it, and continue walking along the road on the other side.
This part of Coventry is a mixture of student housing and established residents arrayed across a variety of housing types, mostly pre-Second World War.
The road curves around quite sharply in places.
Soon you pass the alleyway which runs downhill to the Charterhouse Park, where the remarkable Historic Coventry Trust tended Charterhouse stands, next to the River Sherbourne.
Past this alleyway you cross a road and carry on straight ahead down a road lined with late 19th Century houses on the far side.
Soon you reach another junction. Here turn left, then almost immediately right, working your way through the terraces.
At the bottom of the terrace turn right.
Then soon take another right, along a road which you walk to the top of.
At the top of the road turn left.
Soon you reach a junction where you turn right. There is a kink in the road partway along where you turn left.
Upon reaching the top of the road you are on a major road intersection. Turn left here and walk for a short distance until you reach the top of Far Gosford.
Turn left at the top of Far Gosford and begin walking downhill.
Far Gosford is one of Coventry’s most historic roads with numerous old businesses. It is also pretty vibrant being in a multicultural part of the city, and one where many students live, shop and socialise.
At the bottom of Far Gosford you pass a recently built block of student flats, and near the Coventry University campus.
Here you cross a busy road and continue on the far side approaching the university campus, with its distinctive late 1990s library, commissioned shortly after Lanchester Polytechnic became first Coventry Polytechnic then Coventry University. It has thin towers protruding from it, like the enigmatic, slightly bizarre medieval tores of Bologna, the Italian city where the first modern university was established in the 11th Century.
You reach the inner ring road which broadly follows the lines of Coventry’s ancient city walls destroyed in the early 1660s on the orders of Charles II as punishment for the city’s support of Parliament during the Civil Wars of the 1640s and 1650s. Still deeply controversial the ring road celebrated its 50th anniversary in 2024.
Beyond the inner ring road continue walking straight ahead into the city centre.
You walk straight ahead towards the Herbert Museum and Art Gallery, and the historic core of the city around the two cathedrals, with the hulking sandstone town hall straight ahead.
Just past the town hall take the road running straight ahead and to the right towards the statue of Lady Godiva which sits at the centre of Coventry.
This is where the walk ends.
Getting Back
Coventry is very well served by public transport. Coventry Station has trains north along the West Coast Mainline with around five an hour connecting the city to Birmingham New Street. There are also trains south towards London via Rugby, Milton Keynes, and two trains an hour via Northampton. Two trains an hour go south to Leamington Spa, with one an hour running north to Nuneaton. Pool Meadow Bus Station in the city centre has a comprehensive set of services out to Coventry’s suburbs, as well as to numerous towns (including Kenilworth, Warwick, Leamington Spa, Rugby, Nuneaton, Solihull and Birmingham) in the surrounding area.