Benjamin+Clark+MA+Dissertation+2015

Memory in Ruins: Remembering War in the Ruins of

Coventry Cathedral

Benjamin Clark

Architectural History Report

September 2015

MEMORY IN RUINS | 2

MA Architectural History

Memory in Ruins: Remembering War in the Ruins of Coventry Cathedral

2014/2015

Submitted by: Benjamin Clark

SN: 14079354

Submitted on: 21 September 2015

Architectural History Report

BENVGBE2

Supervisor: Professor Iain Borden

Module Coordinator: Dr Peg Rawes

The Bartlett School of Architecture

University College London

MEMORY IN RUINS | 3

Acknowledgements

First and foremost, I would like to thank my grandparents, John and

Veronika Simons, for putting me up and putting up with me while I wrote

this dissertation. I would also like to thank my parents and sister, Andrew

Clark, Katherine Simons, and Rose, for their on-going support, as well as

Hollie Wilkinson for her extraordinary patience. Finally, I would like to thank

my supervisor, Iain Borden. Were it not for his extraordinary patience and

encouraging support throughout this process; I would have surely been lost.

MEMORY IN RUINS | 4

Abstract

This dissertation examines the use of ruins as war memorials in light of

continuing debates concerning their use for this purpose. The preservation

of the ruins of Coventry’s 14th-century Cathedral, which was destroyed in

the Blitz during the Second World War, is used as a case study. Rebuilt after

the war, the new Cathedral incorporated the ruins of the old as a memorial

to the city’s devastating wartime experience. As the architect of the

reconstruction, Basil Spence created a memorial that would be seen not as

a reminder of suffering and loss, but as one that invited recollection of the

Blitz in the spirit of peace and reconciliation. It is therefore an example of

what scholars have seen as a problem for such memorials: they give

permanent form to a particular interpretation of experience that may be

ideological in its intent. This is undeniable, but so too is the fact, pointed

out by Pierre Nora, that the public selects the interpretation it wants to

remember, which in this case may have been the one initially conveyed by a

barrage of press reports and photographs that presented the destruction of

the Cathedral as a barbaric atrocity. But arguably, it is not these

considerations that should affect how Spence’s memorial is assessed. In

linking the destruction of the Cathedral to its post-war reconstruction, his

design memorialises the city’s determination to transcend its traumatic

wartime experience.

MEMORY IN RUINS | 5

Contents

Page

Introduction 6

Signifying Sites of Destruction 13

Capturing Coventry’s Blitz 21

Devastated Architecture and the Language of Remembrance 29

Not a War Memorial in Christendom to Match This 39

History Looks Over Its Shoulder 50

Conclusion 56

Bibliography 60

Appendix: Interview Transcript 70

MEMORY IN RUINS | 6

Introduction Seventy-five years on, the Blitz continues to loom large in the British

popular imagination, assuming virtually mythical status. While arguably the

most common experience of the Second World War for Britain’s urban

populations, the ways in which the Blitz is remembered are ‘partial,

fragmented and dispersed.’1 Memories of the concentrated aerial

bombardment of London and other British cities by the German Luftwaffe

during the early years of the Second World War are sustained through a

cultural myriad of personal testimonies, photographs, films, television

programmes, artworks, professional histories, and literature. In addition, the

consequences of the bombing raids have been inscribed on the cityscapes

themselves through the vigorous post-war urban planning and architectural

reconstruction that they necessitated. Nowhere else have the effects of the

Blitz been more irrevocably inscribed into the urban landscape than in

Coventry.

On the night of November 14 1940, Coventry became the first British city

outside of London to experience sustained aerial bombardment. Referred

to as the ‘Coventry Blitz’, this single event, lasting just 10 hours, ultimately

caused a complete topographical reordering of the city: 568 civilians were

killed, 863 severely injured, and its dense urban topography, consisting of

‘factories, small workshops, shops, flats and houses of all kinds… mixed up

1 Gabriel Moshenka, ‘Charred churches or iron harvests?: Counter-monumentality and the

MEMORY IN RUINS | 7

together around the ancient centre’, was devastated.2 The city’s medieval

street pattern was obliterated to such an extent that one eyewitness

recalled, ‘After the Blitz, the first time I went into Coventry you did not

know where you were at all.’ 3

Coventry’s Blitz exemplified the combination of devastation, dislocation and

loss that aerial bombardment can impose on the urban landscape. It was

this brute physicality that arguably led to the emergence of a distinctly

urban phenomenon after the Second World War: the preservation of bomb-

damaged buildings as war memorials. This dissertation examines one such

case in light of contemporary theorizing about the use of war ruins as

memorials: the preservation of Coventry’s bomb-damaged 14th century

Cathedral.

While Coventry’s wartime experience was not unique, its post-war memorial

landscape probably is. The only cathedral to be destroyed in the German air

raids, Coventry’s St Michael’s Cathedral was arguably the most prominent

architectural casualty of the Blitz. After the war, its ruin was preserved as a

monument to national and civic loss.4 The resolution to rebuild was

accompanied by the decision to have the new building ‘entwined and in

dialogue with the ruins of the old.’5 Perhaps the only example in Britain of a

post-war reconstruction project to incorporate its own ruins as a dedicated

memorial space, Coventry Cathedral offers an interesting opportunity to

2 Norman Longmate, Air Raid: the bombing of Coventry, 1940 (London: Hutchinson, 1976) pp 15-16; 60,000 buildings were either levelled or damaged, and 4,000 homes were totally destroyed. 3 Rory Olcayto, ‘Coventry Complex’, The Architects Journal, v. 229 n. 3 (2009) p 21. 4 Heather Wiebe, Britten’s Unquiet Pasts: Sound and Memory in Postwar Reconstruction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012) p 193. 5 Robert Bevan, The Destruction of Memory (London: Reaktion Books, 2006) p 191.

MEMORY IN RUINS | 8

explore the relationships between memory, conflict and the built

environment.

When transformed into a memorial, a war ruin is an example of what Pierre

Nora describes as a site of memory (lieu de mémoire) around which

narratives of the past are articulated, negotiated, represented, and

crystallised. 6 It is a site considered to have the power to evoke and sustain

memories. Nora’s concept was influenced by the work of the sociologist

Maurice Halwbachs on collective memory and the semiotics of space.7

Halbwachs suggested that memory is formed not just by consciously lived

experience, but also by collective representations of socially produced

physical spaces:

collective memory unfolds within a spatial framework… space is a reality that endures: since our impressions rush by, one after another, and leave nothing behind in the mind, we can understand how we recapture the past only by understanding how it is, in effect, preserved by our physical surroundings.8

The theorizing of Halbwachs and Nora helps us to locate a distinctly spatial

dimension of urban conflict memories in cities most affected by its

destructive force. It is upon the spaces and buildings of cities that conflict

leaves a visibly lasting imprint, and it is through these same built, lived in,

and imagined spaces of cities that it can be recalled.9

6 Pierre Nora, ‘Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire’, Representations, n. 26, Special Issue: Memory and Counter-Memory (1989) pp 7-24. 7 Reuben Rose-Redwood, Derek Alderman, Maoz Azaryahu, ‘Collective memory and the politics of urban space: an introduction’, GeoJournal, v. 73 (2008) pp 161-164. 8 Maurice Halbwachs, The Collective Memory, trans. Francis J. Ditter, Jr., and Vida Y. Ditter (New York: Harper Colophon, 1980) p 140. 9 Jorg Arnold, The Allied Air War and Urban Memory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011) p 11.

MEMORY IN RUINS | 9

Since the emergence of the field of ‘memory studies’ in the 1990s, there has

been a sustained interest in researching ‘collective’ memories of the

experience of violent conflict. As Finney notes, ‘[w]ork on the memory of

war has lain at the heart of the broader memory project’10. Much of this

work has been about the commemoration and institutionalization of

collective memory by such cultural practices as the erection of war

memorials.11 In a noteworthy contribution to the findings, historians have

pointed out that there was no boom in memorialising after 1945, in contrast

to the one that occurred after the First World War. As Goebel and Keene

put it, memories of the Second World War ‘struggled to find a designated

space’ in the memorial landscapes of cities.12

However, the task of appropriately representing and remembering the

ruins, voids, and absences left behind in cities effected by violent conflict

has been the subject of much debate among cultural critics, historians,

archaeologists architects and urban theorists, after the Second World War.

More recently, memory scholars inspired by the work of Halbwachs and

Nora have once again shifted their attention towards issues involved in the

memorialisation of post-war urban landscapes. Discussion of these issues

has formed part of broader debates over legacies of destruction and, as

concisely summarised by Kerr in his study of Blitz memorials in London, ‘the

problematic relationship between the act of memory and its

10 Patrick Finney, ‘On Memory, Identity and War’, Rethinking History, v. 6 (2002) p 5. 11 Jay Winter, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). 12 Stefan Goebel, Derek Keene, ‘Towards a Metropolitan History of Total War: An Introduction’, Stefan Goebel, Derek Keene (eds.), Cities into Battlefields: Metropolitan Scenarios, Experiences and Commemorations of Total War (Surrey: Ashgate, 2011) p 29.

MEMORY IN RUINS | 10

institutionalization in built form’13. It is a relationship that has received

particular attention in studies of Holocaust, Berlin Wall, and 9/11 memorial

sites.14 A major feature of all of these studies is the emphasis they place on

the void, the palimpsest, the ruin, and other material signifiers that point

towards violent histories, but whose meanings might have become

obscured.15

In situating my study within these debates, I explore how preserved war

ruins in urban settings emerged as a unique form of war memorial after the

Second World War, and what these traces of destruction signify about the

violence that created them. Specifically, I explore the metamorphosis of

Coventry’s wartime experience into built form through the symbolic and

material transformation of the ruins of its Cathedral into a site of memory.

In doing so, I move away from the study of intentionally erected war

memorials towards other, more vernacular, topographies of war

remembrance.

The ruin-turned-memorial raises a number of critical questions about post-

war commemorative culture. Why did bomb-damaged buildings, especially

churches, come to be seen as symbolic of the wartime experience of cities?

As a commemorative object, what role does the war ruin play in the

reproduction of urban memories of war? And what does it reveal about how

13 Joe Kerr, ‘The Uncompleted Monument: London, War, and the Architecture of Remembrance’, Iain Borden, Joe Kerr, Jane Rendell, Alicia Pivaro (eds.), The Unknown City (London: The MIT Press, 2001) p 70. 14 James E. Young, The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning (London: Yale University Press, 1993); Karen Till, The New Berlin: Memory, Politics, Place (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005); Paul Goldberger, Up from Zero: Politics, Architecture and the Rebuilding of New York (New York: Random House, 2004). 15 C. Greig Crysler, ‘Time’s Arrows: Spaces of the Past’, C. Greig Crysler, Stephen Cairns, Hilde Heynen, The SAGE Handbook of Architectural Theory (London: SAGE Publications, 2013) pp 301-302.


violent histories have been mediated and represented in urban space? To

answer these questions and a number of others that they prompt, I base my

approach on one put forward by James E. Young in his book The Texture of

Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning. Young refers to memorials as

‘texts’ that are able to construct memory by ascribing certain meanings to

the past. He proposes taking a ‘textured’ approach to ‘reading’ these sites

of memory through an analysis of:

the activity that brought them into being, the constant give and take between memorials and viewers, and finally the responses of viewers to their own world in light of a memorialised past.16

While the scope and depth of Young’s study goes well beyond the reach of

mine, his methodology provides a useful starting point for my analysis of

Coventry Cathedral’s ruins as a war memorial.

First, it seems prudent to clarify my intended use of the term ‘war

memorial’. It is based on Mayo’s broad definition as

Whether a statue, a place, a building, or a combination of these and other elements, a war memorial is a social and physical arrangement of space and artefacts to keep alive the memories of persons who participated in a war sponsored by their country.17

For my study, the combination of elements that constitutes the memorial is

a war ruin. Its aim was to keep alive the memories of participants in a war,

though of course these were involuntary participants. They had war thrust

upon them.

The study is split into five sections. The first uses Pierre Nora’s concept of

Lieux de Memoire to develop a theoretical framework with which to explain 16 Young, The Texture of Memory, p ix. 17 James M. Mayo, ‘War Memorials as Political Memory’, Geographical Review, v. 78 n. 1 (1998) p 62.


how a ruin might become a signifier of wartime experience. The next four

sections apply this framework to the specific case of Coventry. In these I

explore the destructive events and wartime context that initially led to the

emergence of Coventry’s ruins as a prominent site of memory, the anxieties

and debates surrounding the decision to preserve the ruins as a memorial

after the war, and commentaries on the completed memorial. As the

experiences of the Blitz and the Second World War begin to fade ever

further from living memory, I highlight the importance of locating and re-

evaluating the ways in which their consequences have been memorialised in

the post-war urban landscape, and the meanings that are attributed to

them.


Signifying Sites of Destruction

Traces of Destruction

The devastation of a city through war is undoubtedly a pivotal event in its

history. With the memory of it sustained through personal testimonies,

photographs, films, literature, and professional histories, the event becomes

irrevocably associated with the city in the popular imagination.18 To be

remembered in this way was to be the fate of numerous cities in the

twentieth century, especially those attacked during the Second World War.

As well as the blitzing of British cities, the destruction of Rotterdam (1940),

Stalingrad (1942), Warsaw (1939,1943,1945), Berlin and Dresden (1945),

Hiroshima and Nagasaki (1945) remain some of the most vividly recalled

moments of that conflict for marking the apex of destruction.19

In the built environment of the cityscape, such destruction leaves its trace in

the voids and absences it creates. Eventually, reconstruction erases these

reminders of the initial onslaught. But through its retention, a void can serve

as a potent reminder of the original moment of destruction.20 The conviction

that they could serve this purpose goes someway to explain the widespread

preservation of war ruins in stricken cities from Coventry to Hiroshima after

18 Kerr, ‘The Uncompleted Monument’, p 70. 19 See: Martin Kohlrausch, Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann, ‘Introduction: Post-Catastrophic Cities’, Journal of Modern European History, v 9 n 3 (2011) pp 308-313. 20 Bevan, The Destruction of Memory, p 198.


the Second World War, both as monuments to the events that precipitated

their destruction and as ‘eloquent testimony to the suffering of civilians’.21

The notion that ruins have the potential to evoke the past is not limited to

discourse on war memorialisation. Simine notes that the architectural ruin

always appears to show the past as invading the present, making history

visible through space.22 However, when created by an act of violence, the

ruin can become a reminder of and testament to that act.23 According to

Simmel, the potency of the war ruin’s effect is heightened by its

unnaturalness. He pointed out that when history is made visible by a ruin

created through human-inflicted violence, it contradicts the contrast that

usually gives a ruin its significance: the contrast between the human labour

that created a building and the effect of nature in destroying it.24 Crowley

makes a similar point, noting that, as chronometers, ruins created by

violence measure not the slow and natural decay of ancient buildings, found

so enthralling by 18th- and 19th-century intellectuals, but ‘relatively short

and literally explosive events’.25

Like the traditional monument, the war ruin is generally considered to be

particularly significant in evoking the memory of an event that occurred on

its site. But this connection between event and site is fragile. While a city is

under attack, the site and the event are bound together in time. When the 21 Ken S. Inglis, ‘War Memorials: Ten Questions For Historians’, Guerres Mondiales et conflits contemporains, n. 167, Les Monuments Aux Morts de la Première Guerre Mondiale (1992) p 14. 22 Silke Arnold-de Simine, ‘The Ruins as Memorial – The Memorial as Ruin’, Performance Research: A Journal of the Performing Arts, v. 20 n. 3 (2015) p 95. 23 Simine, ‘The Ruins as Memorial – The Memorial as Ruin’, p 95. 24 George Simmel, ‘Two Essays’, The Hudson Review, v. 11 n. 3 (1958) p 380. 25 David Crowley, ‘Memory in Pieces: The Symbolism of the Ruin in Warsaw after 1944’, Journal of Modern European History, v. 9 n. 3 (2011) p 353.


battle is over, only the site is left, bloody and buried under wreckage, but

otherwise mute. As time passes, site and event will gradually lose their

connection unless a deliberate intervention, such as the erection of a

monument, can reconnect them and re-endow the site with something that

signifies its link to the event in question.26 As Kerr notes, only in this way

can both the site and its past be adequately invested with visible, public

meaning.27 But if a war ruin is to signify a link to the past, and thus acquire

its public meaning, it needs to be framed in a way that provokes a memory

discourse around the controversial events which led to its destruction. This

is an issue on which Nora’s views have been influential.

Sites of Destruction as Sites of Memory

Drawing on Halbwachs, Nora defines memory as ‘the diverse

representational modes through which communities imagine, represent and

enact their specific relationship to the past’28. He argues that modern

society is no longer consciously connected to its own past because, with

increasing rapidity, its consciousness of the present slips into a historical

past that is lost forever.29 Memory, he claims, has been eradicated by the

sense that what is past is the province of the historian, so that history, the

practice of distancing past from present through critical analysis and

representation, is now in fundamental opposition to memory. As

compensation for this rupture of the ties of shared experience and identity,

he claims, we rely on certain sites that seem to offer some measure of

historical continuity. These sites of memory, lieux de mémoire, have

26 Young, The Texture of Memory, p 119. 27 Kerr, ‘The Uncompleted Monument’, p 70 28 Nancy Wood, Vectors of Memory (Oxford: Berg, 1999) p 16. 29 Nora, ‘Between Memory and History’, p 7.


replaced the real environments of memory, milieux de mémoire.30 As a

result, memory has become rooted in the symbols constituted by spaces,

gestures, images, and objects that rely entirely on the materiality of the

trace and the symbolic forms they are given: ‘the immediacy of the

recording, the visibility of the image’.31 He uses the term ‘site’ to include

material and immaterial things, objects, practices, and events that have

been invested with symbolic significance and express a ‘will to remember’. 32

According to Nora, the manifestation of a will to remember is the essential

requirement of any lieu de mémoire; without it the site of memory becomes

‘indistinguishable from the lieu d’histoire (the site of history)’.33

Some of the most obvious examples of what were intended to be lieux de

mémoire are the public monuments and war memorials that can be found

dotted throughout urban landscapes, making up what Gough describes as a

city’s ‘topography of commemoration’.34 Most of them, such as the

Cenotaph or the Tomb of the Unknown Warrior, were inaugurated in the

aftermath of the First World War and display a will to remember the men

who died in battle. These sites deal with issues of absence by functioning as

‘substitute graves triggering memories in absence of bodies’.35 War ruins,

on the other hand, symbolise not the absence of bodies, but absence in

cities. The incarnation of the will to remember in a war-damaged building

can transform a site of destruction into a site of memory; as Clark suggests,

a preserved ruin can evoke the environment in which a destructive event

30 Nora, ‘Between Memory and History’, p 7. 31 Nora, ‘Between Memory and History’, p 13. 32 Nora, ‘Between Memory and History’, p 19. 33 Nora, ‘Between Memory and History’, p 19. 34 Paul Gough, ‘From Heroes’ Groves to Parks of Peace: landscapes of remembrance, protest and peace’, Landscape Research, v. 25 n. 2 (2000) p 216. 35 Stefan Goebel, Derek Keene, ‘Towards a Metropolitan History of Total War’, p 27.


occurred by displaying the resulting architectural residue on the

landscape.36

As a material trace of a past act of urban violence, the war ruin is arguably a

site that can anchor the memory of a city’s destruction within the city itself.

It can therefore be considered as a site of memory for a quintessentially

urban experience of war. Goebel and Keene suggest , ‘[r]uins implied that

‘the city’ constituted the principal victim’.37 Clark agrees, and maintains that

ruins are an implicit part of all site-specific memorials, and a core element of

the strategy adopted for the way many memorials to traumatic events are

exhibited.38 In a similar vein, Kerr refers to the calculated conservation of

traces of destruction in the cities of Coventry, Dresden, and Hiroshima as

distinctly urban memorials that are highly literal and can be universally

understood as mute testimony to the horrific consequences of aerial

warfare.39

Goebel and Keene suggest that due to their apparent literality ‘ruins-

turned-memorials allowed the survivors to circumvent a key dilemma... [of

assigning] some kind of historical meaning to what happened’.40 However,

in themselves, these crumbling sites of destruction are little more than inert

pieces of the landscape.41 It is not enough for them to simply exist

physically as indexes of destruction; they need to be actively invested with

meaning via an intentional will to remember. This is because, as Koonz

explains, historical memorialisation always depends on the 36 Laurie Beth Clark, ‘Ruined Landscapes and Residual Architecture’, Performance Research: A Journal of the Performing Arts, v. 20 n. 3 (2015) p 84. 37 Goebel, Keene, ‘Towards a Metropolitan History of Total War’, p 30. 38 Clark, ‘Ruined Landscapes and Residual Architecture’, p 84. 39 Kerr, ‘The Uncompleted Monument’, p 78. 40 Goebel, Keene, ‘Towards a Metropolitan History of Total War’, p 30. 41 Young, The Texture of Memory, p 119.


interpretation of a signifier… a symbol that stands between the viewer and the event commemorated; once a powerful icon enters into circulation, its connotations are set in motion. Thus historical revision inheres in the process of memorialisation.42

Thus the task for those who choose to preserve a war ruin as a memorial is

to try to find a way of presenting it that will shape the interpretation, so

that it will be an enduring symbol of the traumatic event and the historical

significance, or moral resonance, of the site. According to Gough, once a

war ruin comes to be considered in this way, as a significant ‘historical

trace’, it can often assume a greater authority as a signifier of the past than

other, more artificial, forms of war commemoration.43 Thus, the preservation

of a war ruin as a memorial nearly always reflects a desire to produce a

legitimized historical narrative of wartime experience and have it inscribed

into the landscape: stories of violence, destruction, sacrifice, or collective

victimization. Of course, what it is meant to signify may not be what a

historian would recognize as an authentic representation.

In Young’s view, just the existence of memorials perpetuates an illusion.

Referring to the way traumatic historical events are memorialized through

monuments, he maintains that the outcome is to create an illusion about the

mnemonic significance of a particular space: ‘By creating common spaces

for memory, monuments propagate the illusion of common memory’.44 In

the case of war ruins, there is also the fundamental problem of

distinguishing between the remnants of conflict and the representation of

it. Young points out that remnants of destruction tend to collapse the 42 Claudia Koonz, ‘Between Memory and Oblivion: Concentration Camps in German Memory’, John R. Gillis (ed.), Commemorations (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1994) p 260. 43 Paul Gough, ‘Sites in the Imagination: the Beaumont Hamel Newfoundland Memorial on the Somme’, Cultural Geographies, v. 11 n. 3 (2004) p 237. 44 Young, The Texture of Memory, p 6.


distinction between what they are and what they evoke, always inviting us

to mistake the debris of history for history itself.45 That mistake can be

made more likely by the form of the memorial. He points out that

memorials are often state-sponsored, and tend to ‘concretise’ certain

historical interpretations.46 Dwyer and Alderman share this view and note

that ‘memorials narrate history in selected and controlled ways – hiding as

much as they reveal’47.

Once a particular interpretation is imposed on it, a war ruin can create a

new space in the city for propagating a common memory of its own

traumatic wartime experience. Gillis advocates the importance of such

physical artefacts to the mechanisms of memory, arguing that ‘people find it

difficult to remember without access to mementos, images, and physical

sites to objectify their memory.’48 But such objectifications implicitly

privilege certain meanings over others in their representations of the past.

On the other hand, the meanings attributed to war memorials are always

dependent on the vicissitudes of memory. As Nora points out, the past is

always represented through a kaleidoscope of history, memory, ideals and

politics. Society actively selects what meanings it ‘wills to remember’, a

process entailing that other meanings be forgotten and relegated to the

lieu d’histoire. But these meanings do not necessarily remain fixed. The

palimpsest-like layering of historical and commemorative significance at

these sites are, as Nora maintains, ‘forever open to a full range of possible

significations’49. Thus, examining why certain war ruins have been preserved

45 Young, The Texture of Memory, p 120. 46 Young, The Texture of Memory, p 2. 47 Owen J. Dwyer, Derek H. Alderman, ‘Memorial landscapes: analytic questions and metaphors’, GeoJournal, v. 73 n. 3 (2008) p 169. 48 John R. Gillis, ‘Memory and identity: the history of a relationship’, John R. Gillis (ed), Commemorations (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1994) p.17. pp 3-26. 49 Nora, ‘Between Memory and History’, p 24.


as sites of memory, what meanings have been assigned to them, and how

these meanings have subsequently been mediated over time, is imperative

if we are to understand how the Second World War has come to be

memorialised in post-war cities such as Coventry.


Capturing Coventry’s Blitz

The intensity of the attack on Coventry on the night of 14th November 1940

and the level of destruction caused had not previously been experienced

anywhere else in Britain other than London. According to Mass Observation

surveyor Tom Harrison, the amount of ordnance dropped on Coventry that

night was ‘nearly twice the cumulative total on any one London borough

during all the preceding month’50. At the time, it had been the largest air

raid on a British city ever. The destruction of the city’s Cathedral became

the focus of the traumatic experience, paving the way for its emergence as

a poignant site of memory after the war. To understand how this happened,

it is necessary to revisit how Coventry’s destruction was reported by the

mass media in the immediate aftermath of the attack.

Writing from Coventry on the morning of the 15 November 1940, Hilda

Marchant of the Daily Express wrote, ‘the centre of Coventry is one choking

mass of ruins’51. Throughout the war, the British press functioned as

powerful memory agents in their selective, and censored, reporting of

events. Early in 1940, the Ministry of Information insisted that censorship

laws governing news coverage of air raids be relaxed in order to counter

speculation and scaremongering. As a result, Coventry’s destruction

received unprecedented news coverage. The early reports were extensively

manipulated for propaganda purposes, and generally construed the attack

as an ‘outrage to decency’, with heavy emphasis placed on the city’s

50 Tom Harrison, Living Through The Blitz (London: Faber and Faber, 2010) p 132. 51 Hilda Marchant, Daily Express (16 November 1940) p 1.


innocence and the valour of its civilians, as well as its physical destruction.52

The raid on Coventry was initially revealed on national radio in the

afternoon of 15 November 1940. But by the evening further details of the

‘particularly vicious’ raid were disclosed: ‘the raiders dropped their bombs

indiscriminately on churches, hospitals and the homes of the people’53. The

national press followed suit. The Times spoke of ‘butchery at Coventry…

the wanton slaughter by a people pretending to be civilized who… kill

mostly for the joy of destroying’54. Local newspapers ramped up this

rhetoric by employing a familiar reference. The headline of the Birmingham

Gazette on November 16 1940 read: ‘Coventry – Our Guernica’. On the

same day, the Daily Herald reported that the raid was ‘the greatest

bombardment in the history of warfare… Apparently, the Luftwaffe was

striving to make Coventry a second Guernica’55. The comparison with the

destruction of Guernica in 1937, largely regarded by the British as the worst

pre-war bombing atrocity and the epitome of fascist brutality, implied that

Coventry was, like Guernica, a peaceful civilian city that had been victimized

by a violent regime.56 The comparison with Guernica was, to say the least,

an exaggeration. At the time Coventry was very actively engaged in

manufacturing armaments and aircraft to be used against Germany.57

However, as if to emphasize the Coventry’s innocence, the majority of

accounts placed the burnt-out carcass of St Michael’s Cathedral at the

epicentre of Coventry’s ground zero.

52 Louise Campbell, Coventry Cathedral: Art and Architecture in Post-War Britain (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996) p 8. 53 Longmate, Air Raid, p 209. 54 Quoted in Campbell, Coventry Cathedral, p 9. 55 Quoted in Tim Lewis, Moonlight Sonata: the Coventry Blitz, 14/15 November 1940 (Coventry: Tim Lewis and Coventry City Council, 1990) p 146. 56 Richard Overy, The Bombing War (London: Allen Lane, 2013) p 34. 57 John Grindrod, Concretopia (Brecon: Old Street Publishing, 2013) p 102.


Built as a parish church in the 14th century, it was not until 1918 that

Coventry Cathedral acquired cathedral status (fig. 1). The reason for the

upgrade was the need for a cathedral in the newly formed Diocese of

Coventry, created to cater for the city’s exponential growth during the first

half of the 20th century. During the bombing, the timber roof was set alight

by an incendiary device, and the ensuing heat caused the buckling of iron

girders inserted during restorative work in the late 19th century. As a result

the roof, internal arcades, and clerestory all collapsed, leaving only the

outer walls, tower, and spire still standing. The Provost, who first saw the

gutted Cathedral at 6am that morning, said ‘the appearance of the ruins

was so completely different from the Cathedral before the destruction that

it was impossible to think of them as the same building’58.

The imagined attitudes of the city were freely attributed to the ruins by the

press. Spalding has suggested that this was because the image of the

Cathedral’s ruin, ‘appeared to convey both vulnerability and defiance.’59 The

Cathedral was assigned the role of sentinel by the Birmingham Gazette,

which reported: ‘The proud spirit of Coventry cathedral yesterday stood as

a sentinel over the grim scene of destruction below’60. The New York Herald

Tribune attributed grimmer symbolism to the site. It published a

photograph of the Cathedral’s interior, strewn with rubble, looking

eastwards towards the apse (fig. 2). The image was captioned, ‘The gaunt

ruins of St Michael’s Cathedral, Coventry, stare from the photographs, the

58 Richard Howard, Ruined and Rebuilt: The Story of Coventry Cathedral, 1939-1962 (Coventry: Council of Coventry Cathedral, 1962) p 19. 59 Frances Spalding, ‘John Piper and Coventry, in War and Peace’, The Burlington Magazine, v. 145 n. 1204 (2003) p 488. 60 Quoted in Longmate, Air Raid, p 212.


voiceless symbol of the insane, unfathomable barbarity which has been

released upon western civilization’61.

While appearing to portray the reality of Coventry’s harrowing ordeal, all of

these images were meant to evoke a particular response. With no

armaments factories in sight, it was in the hollow void of the cathedral that

the innocence of Coventry and the physical devastation of the city could be

represented in a way that conveyed the official narrative. The images were

essentially propaganda, intended to reinforce British resolve and raise

international support by highlighting the barbarity of Nazi war methods.

The Daily Mirror published perhaps the most iconic photograph of the ruins.

Taken the morning after the raid from the surviving tower, it showed two of

the steel girders from the collapsed roof lying in the shape of a cross at the

heart of the smouldering ruins (fig. 3). As Campbell comments, while first

framed as a crime against humanity, the raid on Coventry ‘soon became

aestheticized as a crime against the city (symbolized, as in Victor Hugo’s

Notre-Dame de Paris, by its cathedral) and thus as a simultaneous blow to

religion, architecture and history’62. The fate of the city became inextricably

linked to the fate of its Cathedral: ‘All night long the city burned, and her

cathedral burned with her’63. Much as Herbert Mason’s image of St Paul’s

Cathedral, standing defiant amidst the flames, came to represent London’s

war (fig. 4), the image of St Michael’s Cathedral, ruined and still

smouldering, came to define Coventry’s war. As a result, claims Knightly,

‘Coventry has gone down in history as a monument to German

frightfulness’64.

61 Quoted in Howard, Ruined and Rebuilt, p 18. 62 Campbell, Coventry Cathedral, p 10. 63 Howard, Ruined and Rebuilt, p 14. 64 Philip Knightly, The First Casualty (London: Quarter, 1982) 223.


Kerr suggests that, because the Second World War was the first conflict to

be fought ‘wholly in the glare of the flashbulb’; the conflict gave rise to a

universal memorial culture based on the photographic image.65 Certainly the

Coventry Blitz is still primarily remembered through the photographs we

have of it. Even now, looking at images of the ruined Cathedral, we are

unable to separate the ruin from the destructive event that created it. The

photographs appear to crystallize the experience of the exact moment after

the devastating impact of total war was unleashed on the city.

Thus these lasting images achieved their aim of investing this particular site

of destruction with a symbolic and mnemonic significance, making them an

incarnation of a will to remember the city’s wartime experience. Coventry

was rapidly identified in Britain and internationally as the city with the

devastated centre, and over the course of the war it came to represent the

suffering of other bombed towns and cities across the country.66 Regarded

as the first ‘Martyred City’, a symbol of the damage to English culture in the

struggle against the Nazis, the inherently religious symbolism of sacrifice

and martyrdom were readily attached to the Cathedral ruins.67 By the end of

the war, Thomas suggests, the Cathedral had become an ‘embodiment and

a symbol of the futile destruction of war, and thereby of the religious

doctrines of death and sacrifice.’68

The propagandist images of the ruins propagated the officially sanctioned

image of Coventry as innocent, peaceful, and unjustly destroyed, vulnerable

65 Kerr, ‘The Unfinished Monument’, p 76. 66 Nicholas Bullock, Building the post-war world: modern architecture and reconstruction in Britain (London: Routledge, 2002) p 267. 67 Bevan, The Destruction of Memory, p 79. 68 John Thomas, The New Bell’s Cathedral Guides: Coventry Cathedral (London: Unwin Hyman, 1987) p 120.


but defiant. This projected image of the ruins of the Cathedral created a

new space in the common memory. Thus the use of the photographs should

be seen as an initial act of historical memorialisation. Kerr echoes Nora’s

suggestion that our memory now relies on material traces and visible

images:

through the ephemeral medium of the photograph the city itself is memorialized, but from this a wholly new monument is created from the city. Now it is the very real – and readable – remains of the devastated architecture that form a new language of remembrance. 69

The Cathedral ruin came to be considered material testimony to the image

of urban devastation captured by the Coventry Blitz, but as a language of

remembrance it would prove controversial to translate in the post-war city.

69 Kerr, ‘The Unfinished Monument’, p 78.


Fig. 2: Looking east towards the apse, image publ ished in New York Hera ld Tribune , 1940.

F ig. 1: St Michael's Cathedral before the war , 1918


Fig. 3: The defining image of the Coventry Bl itz. Taken from the tower and printed in the Dai ly Mirror , 1940.

Fig. 4: The most iconic photo of the Blitz. Herbert Mason’s photograph of St Paul 's Cathedral during the London Bli tz, 1940.


Devastated Architecture and the Language of

Remembrance

‘There is no instruction manual’ writes Goldberger of post-9/11 New York,

‘to tell a city what to do when its tallest buildings are suddenly gone, and

there is a void in its heart’70. Coventry faced a similar problem in the

aftermath of the Blitz, especially over what to do about its devastated

Cathedral. In the debates over the reconstruction of the building, the

significance of the ruins as a site of memory became heavily contested.

The argument for preserving Britain’s war ruins

In 1943 The Architectural Review published what could be regarded as an

instruction manual for what to do with church buildings destroyed by the

Blitz. It was described as an attempt to tackle ‘two burning questions of the

day: what would be the sincerest, most genuine memorials to the dead of

this war, the dead overseas and on the home front, and what is to be the

future of the bombed churches of Britain’71. In 1944 The Times published a

letter on the subject written by a group of individuals prominent in cultural

circles. They advocated that bomb-damaged churches be ‘preserved in their

ruined condition, as permanent memorials of this war’72.

70 Goldberger, Up from Zero, p xi. 71 Bombed Churches as War Memorials (Surrey: The Architectural Press War Address, 1945) p 4. 72 Marjory Allen of Hurtwood, David Cecil, Kenneth Clark, F. A. Cockin, T. S. Eliot, H. S. Goodhart-Rendel, Julian Huxley, Keynes, E. J. Salisbury, ‘Letter reprinted from The Times, Tuesday August 15 1944 titled ‘Ruined City Churches’’, Bombed Churches as War Memorials (Surrey: The Architectural Press War Address, 1945) p 4.


The following year, a book, Bombed Churches as War Memorials, was

published (fig. 5). In the opening chapter, ‘Ruins for Remembrance’,

architect Hugh Casson proposed that, after the war, some of London’s

bomb-damaged churches should be preserved as ‘garden-ruins’: to serve as

sanctuaries, pleasant open spaces, and, most importantly, war memorials.

The book was illustrated with conceptual sketches of what a bombed

church converted into a memorial garden-ruin would look like (fig. 6 & 7). As

Peter Webster suggests, ‘these were memorials that would be at once

beautiful, provocative of thought and of practical use’73. Explaining his view

of the significance of ruined churches, Casson wrote:

[W]ith us they have undergone the physical trials of war, and bear its scars… though they stand to-day upon what is still a battle-field, it will not always be so. It will not be many years before all traces of war damage will have gone, and its strange beauty vanished from our streets. … Soon a pock-marked parapet or a broken cornice will be to future generations the only signs of former shock and flame… with their going the ordeal through which we passed will seem remote, unreal, perhaps forgotten.74

For Casson and others, only devastated architecture could effectively

portray the reality of Britain’s wartime experience. The letter to The Times

had revealed a pervading unease about how to appropriately represent a

war that had seen British civilians also drawn into the conflict. The authors

suggested that the majority of war memorials erected after the First World

War, abstract monuments and statues representing victory and sacrifice to

honour soldiers who had died fighting in foreign lands, were considered

unsuitable. This was due to a perceivably ‘vast gulf of feeling’ between the

actual wartime experiences of soldiers and the sentiments expressed by the

73 Peter Webster, ‘Beauty, Utility and Christian Civilisation: war memorials and the Church of England, 1940-47’, Forum for Modern Language Studies, n. 44 v. 2 (2008), p 206. 74 Hugh Casson, ‘Ruins for Remembrance’, Bombed Churches as War Memorials (Surrey: The Architectural Press War Address, 1945) p 21.


memorials. Kenneth Clark et al. instead argued that now ‘England has itself

been in the battle and London is still in it… Could there be a more

appropriate memorial of the nation’s crisis than the preservation of

fragments of its battleground?’75.

The desire to maintain the architectural fragments of Britain’s war-torn cities

appears, therefore, to have been motivated by what Lacquer calls the

‘anxiety of erasure’, stemming from a lack of faith in traditional

commemorative traditions: ‘the thing itself must do because representation

can no longer be relied on.’76 These influential opinions were the first public

expression in Britain of the notion that physical war ruins had the capacity

to articulate the language of war remembrance. To some extent, Casson’s

suggestions were eventually followed in the rebuilding of Coventry

Cathedral, though only after much deliberation.

The decision to preserve Coventry’s ruins

The destruction of St Michael’s Cathedral had left a huge void, not only in

the heart of the physical city but also in the metaphorical heart of the

civitas. It was impractical just to leave the Cathedral in its ruined state as a

memorial, in the way that Casson had envisioned for London’s smaller

bomb-damaged churches. In fact, the decision to rebuild had been taken

the morning after the raid, when the Provost, Richard Howard, evidently

aware of the symbolism of the occasion, declared from within the ruins: ‘The

Cathedral will rise again. It will be rebuilt and will be as great a pride to the

75 ‘Letter reprinted from The Times, Tuesday August 15 1944 titled ‘Ruined City Churches’, Bombed Churches as War Memorials, p 4. 76 Thomas Lacquer, ‘The Past’s Past’, London Review of Books, v. 18 n. 18 (1996) pp 3-7.


generations of the future as to the generations of the past.’77 Rather than an

act of defiance, the declaration was widely seen as a gesture of optimism,

faith, and hope for a peaceful future.

However, nothing was decided until after the war about how the Cathedral

should be rebuilt, and what was to become of its ruins. The ruins were

certainly not destined from the outset to be preserved as a memorial, as is

evident from the following summary of the initial questions that faced the

Cathedral Council:

Would it be better to leave the ruins as a kind of war memorial in the form of a Garden of Rest? Should we try to rebuild the Cathedral exactly as it was before the destruction? If not, should we rebuild it in the Gothic style, or in a modern style, or in a mixture of both? Was it proper to rebuild at all, when the War Damages Compensation money might be used to build new parish churches? […] In view of the need for houses and hospitals, would it be better to postpone rebuilding to some date in the future?78

In 1941 a Rebuilding Commission was set up to push ahead with rebuilding

by appointing an architect and exploring issues connected to the site and

design of a new Cathedral. It was generally hoped that a new one could be

built either on or close to the existing site. In 1942 Giles Gilbert Scott was

announced as the new Cathedral architect. He submitted his proposed

designs in 1944-45, but his inability to conform to the limitations of the site,

including the ruins, led to the rejection of his designs by the Royal Fine Art

Commission and his resignation in 1947. In response to Gilbert Scotts’

resignation, Lord Harlech was commissioned to produce a report advising

on what to do next. Published on 7 July 1947, the report advised that the

new Cathedral be built on the same site, or as close as possible to the

original and in a traditional Gothic style. In his view, to leave the surviving

77 Coventry Standard (30 November 1940) quoted in Grindrod, Concretopia, p 100. 78 Howard, Ruined and Rebuilt, p 27.


tower and spire without an appropriately matching church would be ‘both a

dereliction of duty and an acquiescence in the destruction wrought on 14

November 1940 by the forces of oppression and evil’79. The report also

stipulated that the ruined outer walls were not strong enough to be

incorporated into a new building and should be demolished. However, the

treatment of the ruins seriously divided opinion between architects, clergy,

and local people. According to Campbell, by the late 1940s interest in

‘preserving the ruins in their entirety’ had become the central issue for the

Cathedral’s reconstruction project.80

After the raid, the Cathedral ruins had continued to serve as a place of

worship. In 1941, a local stonemason, Jock Forbes, created an altar from

rubble found on the site (the ‘Altar of Rubble’) and erected it in what had

once been the sanctuary. A Cross, fashioned from the Cathedral’s charred

roof beams and bound together by blackened wire (the ‘Charred Cross’),

was then placed on top of the makeshift altar. Owing to wartime

restrictions on labour, the ruins had remained strewn with rubble with no

one available to remove it. However, according to Howard, the provost,

‘[t]his was not wholly regretted’, as many of City’s inhabitants appeared to

have shared Casson’s anxiety about erasure:

many people felt that the rubble was what gave the ruins their power, and this power might vanish if the rubble was cleared. For the rest of the war the ruins continued to inspire, challenge, and comfort the tired spirits of Coventry.81

79 Cathedral Archive Coventry (CAC), PA2506/1/1/94, Lord Harlech’s Commission, Coventry Cathedral (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1947) p 19. 80 Louise Campbell, ‘Towards a New Cathedral: The Competition for Coventry Cathedral 1950-51’, Architectural History, v. 35 (1992) p 212. 81 Howard, Ruined and Rebuilt, p 76.


By the end of the war, the commemorative potential of the ruins had

become obvious. On VE Day, 8 May 1945, the people of Coventry

‘completely took possession of the ruins’ to celebrate the end of the war,

and annual commemorative services have been held for the victims of the

Coventry Blitz since 1941.82 The rubble was finally cleared in 1947, and a

temporary garden of remembrance created (fig. 8). According to Howard,

while the rubble ‘had been beautiful’ it had also been ‘austere, desolate,

and uncomfortable’. After it was cleared, he said, ‘the whole thing spoke of

peace’83. A year later, Howard had ‘FATHER FORGIVE’ inscribed on the

sanctuary wall behind the Altar of Rubble, a gesture towards the

Cathedral’s newly acquired commitment to peace and reconciliation (fig. 9).

In suggesting that the ruins be removed to make way for a new cathedral,

the Harlech Report was subsequently criticised for not realizing ‘the

possibilities inherent in the site’84. But many of Coventry’s prominent figures

were not at all anxious about losing the ruins and erasing the memory of

war; it was a memory they were anxious to see erased. In 1947, the local

philanthropist and industrialist Sir Alfred Herbert wrote to the Coventry

Evening Telegraph, imploring his fellow citizens to reject any plan to

preserve the ruin: ‘the retention of parts of its ruin, side by side with a new

and incongruous structure, would only perpetuate the memory of one of

our darkest hours.’85 Worried that the ruins might get in the way of plans for

a dynamic contemporary cathedral, the Bishop of Coventry, Neville Gorton,

told the local architects’ society ‘You cannot have a ruin to represent the

82 Howard, Ruined and Rebuilt, p 82. 83 Howard, Ruined and Rebuilt, p 40. 84 Quoted in Campbell, ‘Towards a New Cathedral’, p 212. 85 Alfred Herbert, ‘Shall the old Cathedral be restored?’, Coventry Evening Telegraph (22 January 1947), p 4.


Church in your city’, and warned against the ‘false sentimental affection’

that the ruins seemed to have attracted.86

In 1950, following another of Lord Harlech’s suggestions, a competition was

launched to find a new architect. The competition criteria, loosely based on

the Harlech Report, stated that the new cathedral had to be built on or next

to the existing site, and the spire and tower must both be retained, but not

necessarily as part of the new build. The remaining ruins however were

expendable at the architect’s discretion.87 This last provision, and the lack of

restrictions on architectural style and materials in the competition rules,

seems to have been in tune with the Bishop’s wishes to make way for a

dynamic new building. Competitors were, however, sent information in the

form of photographs and drawings of the ruins, including depictions of the

wartime services held in them to illustrate their significance (fig. 10).

In 1951, Basil Spence was declared the winner; from the 219 entries, his

design was thought to exhibit ‘spirit and imagination of the highest order’

along with the ‘ability to solve the problem of designing a Cathedral in

terms of contemporary architecture’88. However, more significantly, Spence

appears to have responded to Casson’s appeal by proposing to retain the

ruins in their entirety, incorporating them into his new Cathedral as a

‘memorial to the courage of the people of Coventry’89.

86 Campbell, ‘Towards a New Cathedral’, p 212. 87 Coventry Cathedral: Architectural Competition Conditions and Instructions to Competing Architects (Coventry, 1950) p 11. 88 Basil Spence, Phoenix at Coventry: the Building of a Cathedral (London: George Bles, 1962) p 18. 89 Spence, Phoenix at Coventry, p 117.


Fig. 5: Front cover of Bombed Churches as War Memorials .

F ig. 6: Example of a bombed church converted into a garden-ruin memorial, St Alban’s , London.


Fig. 7: Another example from Bombed Churches as War Memorials showing the converted ruin of St John’s , London.

Fig. 8: Temporary garden of remembrance in the ruins , 1947.


Fig. 10: P lan and elevations of the ruins, sent to architects for the competition, 1950.

F ig. 9: The Altar of Rubble and Charred Cross in the sanctuary of the ruins, as they stand today.


Not a War Memorial in Christendom to Match This

The announcement of Spence’s designs for the new Cathedral in 1951,

followed by the commencement of reconstruction, marked a major turning

point for the Cathedral site. It heralded the transformation of the space,

from former bombsite to an official memorial, and the transformation of

what the space would symbolize, from remnants of a catastrophe to the

commemoration of it.90 On 23 March 1956, 16 years after the Coventry Blitz,

Queen Elizabeth II laid the foundation stone for the new Cathedral, officially

marking the commencement of reconstruction. By this time, the Cathedral

had entered the national consciousness as an important site of memory, not

only of Britain’s wartime suffering, but of its post-war reconstruction as well.

In 1957, the Manchester Guardian was already proclaiming that, ‘there is

not in Christendom a war memorial to match this’91. Elsewhere, other bomb-

damaged buildings were similarly being preserved as war memorials.

Casson’s suggestions, noted in the previous section, appear to have

resonated well beyond Coventry in the years following 1945. In other cities

devastated during the war, the idea of preserving the ruins of religious

buildings as memorials became a recurring theme of discussions of how the

destruction should be commemorated.

90 I take this conception of what the transformation would entail from Gutman’s analysis of the rebuilding of Ground Zero. See: Yifat Gutman, ‘Where do we go from here: The pasts, presents and futures of Ground Zero’, Memory Studies, v. 2 n. 1 (2009), p 56. 91 ‘First Hymns from New Cathedral: Builders ‘Thanksgiving’, Manchester Guardian (1 January 1959).


The significance of religious ruins

Unlike the residential and industrial areas of Coventry that were attacked

during the Blitz, the destruction of the Cathedral had not led to any civilian

casualties. Instead, as already suggested, its destruction was widely

perceived as an attack on the very fabric of the city itself, on religion, and

on the cultural heritage of Britain. For example, in a letter attached to the

building licence for Spence’s new cathedral, the Minister of Works, Sir David

Eccles, wrote to the Lord Mayor of Coventry: ‘we cannot tell how many

people are waiting in this country and abroad for this church to rise and

prove that English traditions live again after the blitz’92.

Similar plans to transform symbolically bomb-damaged buildings into

memorials went ahead in other cities too. In Berlin the ruined tower of the

Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gedächtnis-Kirche was kept as a ‘commemorative foil to a

new structure’ that was built between 1959 and 1963 (fig. 11).93 Across

Britain and Germany, many smaller bombed churches were also preserved

as public memorial spaces. They included St Alban’s in Cologne; St Dunstan-

in-the-East, Christ Church, and St Anne’s in London; St Luke’s in Liverpool;

and St Andrew’s in Plymouth (later reconstructed). In contrast, Dresden’s

Frauenkirche, totally obliterated in the allied bombing of the City in 1945,

was intentionally left as a pile of rubble by the East German authorities after

the war. They wanted it to be a Mahnmal, ‘a monument of admonition’, to

the destructive capability of Western capitalism (fig. 12). It was re-built after

German re-unification.94

92 Quoted in Spence, Phoenix at Coventry, p 86. 93 Nicola Lambourne, War Damage in Western Europe: The Destruction of Historic Monuments During the Second World War (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2001) p 180. 94 Stefan Goebel, The Great War and Medieval Memory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007) p 296.


Other buildings were also memorialised in this period as evidence of

wartime criminality, such as Hiroshima’s exhibition hall, the entire French

village of Oradour-sur-Glane, and a number of concentration camps

scattered throughout Europe.95 In all such cases, Bevan suggests, ‘[t]o have

left no physical trace of the devastation would have been to abnegate the

trauma’96. Although other types of building were treated in the same way,

bomb-damaged religious buildings seem to have emerged as the

predominant form of memorialised ruin, especially in post-war Europe. This

was largely because, as was the case for Coventry, the destruction of

churches appears to have been over-represented in the wartime reporting

of air raids. In both Britain and Germany, depictions of destroyed homes

and workplaces, suggests Moshenka ‘were discouraged by censors for

reasons of morale and national security’97. As a result, after the war it was

the ruins of religious architecture that resonated most readily with popular

notions of the wartime experience of urban areas.

Given that many other bomb-damaged buildings were also preserved, was

the Manchester Guardian justified in proclaiming that Spence’s preservation

of the ruins of Coventry Cathedral would produce a memorial without

match in Christendom? Perhaps not, but the following account of the

Cathedral’s rebuilding will explain why they were considered so significant.

Transforming the Topography of Destruction

The war had left the Cathedral shaped void in the cityscape, one that, as

Herbert had lamented in 1947, served as a reminder of one of the city’s

95 See: Young, The Texture of Memory, pp 49-80, 113-208. 96 Bevan, The Destruction of Memory, p 191. 97 Moshenka, ‘Charred churches or iron harvests?’, p 12.


darkest hours. Adopting a philosophy similar to that expressed by Casson

in Bombed Churches as War Memorials, Spence’s first move as Cathedral

architect was to set about transforming the appearance of the ruins into

one that he believed would reflect a collective transcendence over the city’s

trauma. He summarized his views in this way:

Through the ordeal of bombing, Coventry was given a beautiful ruin… It is felt that the ruin should be preserved as a garden of rest, embracing the open-air pulpit and stage.98

It is clear from his perspective sketch of the ruins what Spence envisioned

for the space (fig. 13): a garden ruin with ample greenery and open space,

‘planted out with trees, shrubs, and flowers, and certain creepers…

encouraged to grow over the old walls’.99 This would serve to radically alter

the appearance of the ruins. The authors of ‘Ruined city churches’ had

emphasised the ‘realism’ and ‘gravity’ with which preserved church ruins

would serve to ‘remind posterity of the reality of the sacrifices upon which

its apparent security has been built’100. But Spence’s treatment of the

Cathedral ruins suggests that maintaining a sense of wartime realism was

not his intention. Chris Woodward has argued that realism could not be

expected of any site that utilised the ideas put forward in Bombed

Churches as War Memorials, which he described as ‘the last great fling of

the British Picturesque, summoning the spirit of Stourhead and Stowe to

soothe the trauma of high explosive bombs’101. Expressing a similar view,

Wiebe suggests that, rather than seeking to preserve the ruins of Coventry

Cathedral as a war-scarred reminder of the harsh realities of the city’s

traumatic wartime experience, Spence’s idea had been to turn them into

98 Spence, Phoenix at Coventry, p 117. 99 Spence, Phoenix at Coventry, p 117. 100 ‘Letter reprinted from The Times, Tuesday August 15 1944 titled ‘Ruined City Churches’, Bombed Churches as War Memorials, p 4. 101 Christopher Woodward, In Ruins (London: Vintage, 2002) p 212.


‘more gentle and familiar ruins of gradual decay, which evoked remnants of

the past rather than permanent examples of it’102.

War Memorial as Sacred Place

Spence’s preservation of the ruins also lends itself to a description using the

distinction between ‘sacred’ and ‘profane’. A war memorial is generally

considered to be a ‘sacred place’ as Kenneth Foote defines it: ‘a site set

apart from its surroundings and dedicated to the memory of an event,

person, or group’103. According to Foote, a place becomes sacred through a

process of ‘sanctification’ in which a landscape is inscribed with a ‘durable

marker’, such as a monument, to be maintained over time for the purposes

of ritual commemoration.104 In his plan for the new Cathedral, Spence had

decided to maintain the physical integrity of the ‘lace-like screen of

masonry’ offered by the remaining outer walls in its entirety, creating just

such a durable marker that would also maintain a separate, delicately

enclosed, space set apart from the rest of the new Cathedral. 105 His new

building was to be positioned at a right angle to the ruins, on a separate

site on the opposite side of St Michael’s Avenue (fig. 14).

In ascribing memorial significance to the ruins, as ‘a memorial to the

courage of the people of Coventry’, and placing the new Cathedral on an

adjacent site, Spence effectively re-sacralised a once sacred site that had

102 Wiebe, Britten’s Unquiet Pasts, p 205. 103 Kenneth E. Foote, Shadowed Ground: America’s Landscapes of Violence and Tragedy (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003) p 8. 104 Foote, Shadowed Ground, p 8. 105 Spence, Phoenix at Coventry, p 5.


been made profane by its violent destruction.106 Mayo outlines the

significance of this distinction:

profane space has amorphous meaning, one in which people have fragmented life experiences. In contrast, sacred space enables a place to have a distinct spiritual meaning amid chaos, and this sacredness is beyond unique individual experiences.107

The significance of this was that the preserved ruins, which were to remain

consecrated, could now be considered as being simultaneously sacred and

profane.108 Thus, the preserved ruins would at once signify the fragmented

experiences of the city’s destruction, while at the same time propagating an

acquired spiritual meaning that would serve to go beyond these individual

experiences. For Spence, and everyone else who had lived through the war,

the spiritual meaning of the ruins was clear, ‘I always saw the old Cathedral

as standing clearly for The Sacrifice’109. The new Cathedral, which Spence

designed in a modernist style expressing the post-war optimism of the

1950s and the Festival of Britain, was to ‘stand for the Triumph of the

Resurrection’.110

The ruins were to be physically incorporated into the new Cathedral via a

Cathedral Porch (fig. 15). A new entrance to the ruins was cut from the

remaining tracery of a window in the north nave wall and steps were

installed leading down under the porch to the main entrance of the new

Cathedral building (fig. 16). Following the new Cathedral’s consecration on

25 May 1962, commentators observed that joined together, the ‘sacrificed’

106 Moshenka, ‘Charred churches or iron harvests?’, p 12. 107 Mayo, ‘War Memorials as Political Memory’, pp 62-63. 108 Interview between author and Jack Fleming, Reconciliation Ministry Team, Coventry Cathedral (Coventry, 17 August 2015). 109 Spence, Phoenix at Coventry, p 117. 110 Spence, Phoenix at Coventry, p 6.


ruins and the ‘resurrected’ new building created a clear architectural

representation of ‘the Atonement’.111

Gutman suggests that, ‘[b]uilding (on) a site of memory is a symbolic-

material practice that forms a concrete version of past events’112. Such a

practice is exemplified by Spence’s topographical work on the ruins and the

symbolism he achieved by their incorporation into his rebuilt Cathedral. He

wanted them to be a concrete version of Coventry’s wartime trauma that

would symbolise wartime loss and sacrifice, but within a wider narrative of

post-war resurrection (fig. 17). Architecturally, he succeeded. We now turn

to the question of whether the architectural success was matched by its

actual performance as a site of memory.

111 R. Furneaux Jordan, ‘Criticism: Cathedral Church of St. Michael, Coventry’, The Architectural Review, v. 132 n. 785 (July 1962) p 28. 112 Gutman, ‘Where do we go from here’, p 56.


Fig. 11: The ruined tower of the Ka iser-Wilhelm-Gedächtnis-Kirche, acting as a commemorative foi l to a new structure, 2006.

F ig. 12: The abandoned remnants of Dresden’s Frauenkirche, 1990.


Fig. 13: Spence’s perspective sketch of the ruins reveals h is intention to transform the space into a garden-ruin, very s imilar to those portrayed in Bombed Churches as War Memorials .


Fig. 15: The porch connect ing the ruins to the new Cathedral .

F ig. 16: New entrance to the ruins, cut from the remaining t racery of a window.

Fig. 14: Ground plan for the new Cathedral, notice how the ruins (on the left) have been kept dis tinct ly separate as an enclosed space.


Fig. 17: A poster produced in 1957 by London Midland Rai lway, advertising the ‘Rebir th’ of Coventry Cathedral , even though it had yet to be completed.


History Looks Over Its Shoulder

History moves forward while looking over its shoulder; how much to commemorate and remember, how much needs to be forgiven then forgotten in the interests of peace within and without?113

Contested symbolism

In a previous section I referred to Koonz’s observation that ‘historical

revision inheres in the process of memorialisation’114. The very process of

creating a memorial implicitly privileges certain meanings over others in the

desire to represent a particular version of the past. In his treatment of the

Coventry ruins, Spence had deliberately concealed the scar left by the

bombing. His picturesque landscaping had manipulated the appearance of

the site, and therefore the meanings it invited. According to Goebel

From the ruins of Coventry emerged a new mode of war commemoration, a mode which focused on the future rather than the past, a mode which invested the act of remembrance (that is reconciliation) rather than death on the battlefield with meaning.115

The ample greenery of the garden-ruin and the contemporary architecture

of the new Cathedral were an invitation to remember the past but not with

bitterness or anger. To the Provost and his colleagues, Spence’s vision

seemed perfectly in tune with Christian belief, epitomized in the inscription

113 Bevan, The Destruction of Memory, p 176. 114 Koonz, ‘Between Memory and Oblivion’, p 260. 115 Goebel, The Great War and Medieval Memory, p 301.


on the wall of the ruined sanctuary, ‘FATHER FORGIVE’. A ‘Reconciliation

Ministry’ was created to promote international peace, which adopted as its

symbol a cross made from nails retrieved from the ruins.116 The preserved

ruins, with their Charred Cross and Alter of Rubble, came to be recognized

internationally as a symbol of peace and reconciliation.

In 1995, Richard Branson funded the Cathedral’s purchase of a sculpture

titled ‘Reconciliation’, by Josefina de Vasconcellos, that was then unveiled in

the ruins (fig. 18). The Cathedral’s staff believed that, situated in the former

site of destruction, the sculpture would draw a certain rhetorical authority

from the ruins and in turn enhance the sanctity of the site through its

illusionary propagation of a common memory, a process Foote calls

‘symbolic accretion’: ‘once sanctified, the sites have attracted additional

memorials.’117 An identical sculpture was simultaneously unveiled in

Hiroshima’s Peace Park, in the shadow of the preserved A-Bomb Dome,

another profane site that had become sanctified through its

memorialisation, to mark the 50th anniversary of the destruction of the

Japanese city. The intention had been to promote better relations between

Britain and Japan by emphasising the shared trauma of the Second World

War endured by the two devastated cities.

However, not everyone was prepared to revel in the spirit of forgiveness

and reconciliation. The unveiling of the sculpture enraged many who had

fought the Japanese in the Second World War. In a letter to the Coventry

Evening Telegraph, the secretary of the Japanese Labour Camp Survivors

Association described the sculpture as ‘a monument to bad taste’ and

116 Interview between author and Jack Fleming, Reconciliation Ministry Team, Coventry Cathedral. 117 Foote, Shadowed Ground, p 231.


explained ‘there can only be reconciliation where there is repentance, and

since we were the injured party we have nothing to repent’118. According to

James Herbert, such ‘bad faith’ has been present in Coventry ever since the

Cathedral was rebuilt. Reconciliation, he argued, was a retrospective

activity, and Coventry’s ability to promote reconciliation in peacetime

ultimately relied on the acknowledgment that it had first been wronged in

wartime. As Herbert suggests, ‘No forgiveness of Germans at Coventry in

1962 without the memory of incendiary bombs dropping in November

1940.’119

Realities not remembered

It seems likely that these unforgiving attitudes were common among those

with bitter memories of their wartime experience. Britain had been attacked

and her civilians deliberately targeted and killed. The notion of preserving

bombed churches had, after all, stemmed from a desire to memorialise

these very real wartime experiences of the Blitz. In Coventry, observers

from Mass Observation, who went to the city on the morning after the Blitz,

had recorded the realities of their experience. They reported that key

phrases used by the survivors were ‘Coventry is finished’ and ‘Coventry is

dead’, and that ‘Many for a while showed no hope for the place. They could

only survive as persons’120. It seemed that everyone in the city had known

someone who was either dead or injured, and there was widespread panic

and a collapse of morale. One of the observers reported ‘more open signs

of hysteria, terror and neurosis… in one evening than during the whole of

the past two months in all areas’121.

118 ‘A monument to bad taste’, Coventry Evening Telegraph (5 July 1995) p 8. 119 James D. Herbert, ‘Bad Faith at Coventry’, Critical Inquiry, v. 25 n. 3 (Spring 1999) p 559. 120 Harrison, Living Through The Blitz, p 135. 121 ‘The Blitz’, Mass Observation Extracts, http://www.massobs.org.uk/images/booklets/Blitz.pdf [accessed 30 August 2015].


The preserving of the ruins failed to acknowledge these fragmented

individual experiences of the Blitz and the anguish that survivors must have

felt at the destruction of their city and the death of relatives and friends. In

other words, the ruins seemed to represent the absent city as victim, but

not necessarily the absent civilian. Attempts to redress this imbalance were

made by the Reconciliation Ministry, which in 2011 decided to ‘give focus

and further purpose to the ruins in the 21st Century by designating them as

a memorial to all civilians killed, injured or traumatised by war and violent

conflict worldwide… and a witness to suffering’122. To emphasise this

renewed focus, a tombstone to ‘Unknown Civilians Killed in War’, has since

appeared in the Cathedral grounds, although there is no record of how it

came to be there (fig. 19). It is an obvious imitation of the Tomb of the

Unknown Warrior in Westminster Abbey. An inconspicuous slab, it is

undoubtedly intended to draw on the symbolism of the ruins for meaning,

and represent a more rounded civilian experience of war by inserting the

absent bodies back into an absent city.

As a consequence of the media’s focus on the destruction of the Cathedral

and the attack on innocent civilians outlined earlier, another important part

of the city’ wartime experience was almost completely overlooked. This was

the major contribution made by its arms factories to the country’s fighting

capacity. In an attempt to address this particular imbalance in the city’s

wartime history, a Home Front Memorial was unveiled in the Cathedral ruins

in 2000 (fig. 20). The Coventry Evening Telegraph proclaimed ‘There could

be no more fitting place for a plaque to honour the Home Front heroes than

in the ruins of Coventry Cathedral… it seemed the perfect site to remember

122 ‘Our reconciliation ministry’, http://www.coventrycathedral.org.uk/wpsite/our-reconciliation-ministry/ [accessed 20 September 2015].


those ordinary people who gave heart and soul for the war effort’123. The

plaque reads:

In gratitude to God, and to commend to future generations the self-sacrifice of all those who served on the Home Front during the Second World War

123 ‘Queen steals a city’s hearts’, Coventry Evening Telegraph (4 March 2000) pp 2-3.


Fig. 18: ‘Reconci liation’ , by Josefina de Vasconcellos.

F ig. 19: Tomb of the Unknown Civil ian.

F ig. 20: Home Front Memorial.


Conclusion

In this dissertation I have examined the preservation of the ruins of

Coventry’s 14th-century Cathedral in light of continuing debates concerning

the use of war ruins as memorials. Destroyed by the Luftwaffe in a single

night in November 1940, Coventry’s Cathedral was the only one to be

destroyed by a German air raid and was probably the most prominent

casualty of the Blitz. Rebuilt after the war, it was the only Cathedral to

incorporate the ruins of the one it replaced, as a monument to national and

civic loss.

There was a time when the purpose of war memorials seemed too obvious

to be questioned but, as has been argued over the course of this

dissertation, scholarly studies have shown that stance to be naive. There

are questions to be considered about the validity of a memorial’s rendering

of the experience that led to its creation, and about its performance in

helping to sustain a memory of the experience, accurate or otherwise.

Questions of both kinds are highly pertinent when the memorials in

question are war ruins.

The very existence of a memorial perpetuates the illusion that a common

memory exists of the experiences it commemorates, and it is also likely to

give permanent form to a particular interpretation of these experiences.

Both points apply to Basil Spence’s treatment of the Coventry ruins. His aim

was not to depict the experience of loss and suffering that the air raids

brought to the city, but rather to invite recollection of the experience in a


spirit of peace and reconciliation. And, through its very existence, the

memorial implies that its rendering of Coventry’s wartime experience is how

that experience should be commonly remembered. The memorial might be

said to embody what Pierre Nora believes is the essential requirement of a

site of memory, the manifestation of a will to remember. But again, what it

wills us to remember is not the past as it was experienced but the past seen

through a screen of Christian sentiment, not too dissimilar from the

abstracted representations of heroic sacrifice so prevalent in memorials to

the First World War. But as I have noted, there was explicit opposition to

the desire to view the past in this way after the Second World War.

Does this mean that the ruins are fundamentally flawed as a memorial?

Before answering this question, other considerations should be taken into

account. First, the memorial is not the only interpretation of Coventry’s

wartime experience on offer, and has probably much less impact than its

principal rival, the press. As I have explained, the press presented the raid

as a barbarous attack on innocent civilians and the destruction of the

Cathedral as emblematic of the enemy’s depravity. It was this

interpretation, illustrated with a barrage of press photographs of the ruined

Cathedral that would shape the form in which Coventry’s Blitz was lodged

in public consciousness, a form subsequently sustained by countless

personal testimonies, films, television programmes, and fictional and non-

fictional accounts.

Secondly, the public consciousness is not a passive vehicle, open to

whatever interpretations of experience it is offered. I have referred to

Nora’s insistence on the fact that, although it is open to the full range of

possible meanings, a society actively selects the interpretations that it


wants to remember. He also points out that the past is viewed through a

kaleidoscope of what actually happened, what we remember, and our moral

and political values. Thus, Spence’s interpretation will have had little impact

if it was not how most people prefer to remember the Blitz.

Finally, whatever interpretation is embodied in a memorial of a city’s

trauma, and even if the memorial has little impact on memories of the past,

its existence meets a deep-rooted sense that we have an obligation to

memorialize the experience of those who suffered. And if it is memorialised,

the memorial will inevitably embody some particular interpretation of the

past. What kind of interpretation should be favoured? One that attempts to

symbolise the understandable anger and bitterness of the survivors of the

trauma? One intended to enhance a feeling of national pride? Personally, I

cannot imagine any interpretation that would be an improvement on the

one that Spence wanted to convey through his transformation of the

Cathedral ruins. Today, as Thomas says in his guide to Coventry Cathedral:

‘We stand not in a medieval church, but in a place that has been fashioned,

by modern destruction and re-creation, as a different, very special, public

place.’124

Bevan has argued that ‘[t]here is a need for truth to be expressed in the

raising of buildings’.125 By linking the moment of its destruction inextricably

to that of its optimistic post-war reconstruction, the rebuilt Cathedral was

intended to represent Coventry as transcending its traumatic wartime

experiences. The spatial arrangement of Spence’s new Cathedral means

that one cannot enter it without first passing through or past the ruins of

the old. A visual straight line from the entrance of the ruins to the new altar

(in the northern end of the new building) forms one of the main axes of the 124 Thomas, The New Bell’s Cathedral Guides, p 119. 125 Bevan, The Destruction of Memory, p 177.


Cathedral (fig. 21). Arriving in the new nave, on the floor there is an

inscription:

TO THE GLORY OF GOD, THIS CATHEDRAL BURNT NOVEMBER 14, 1940, IT IS NOW REBUILT, 1962.

The inscription, drawing authority from the traces of destruction behind it,

affirms a simple historical truth: that the determination to rebuild will always

transcend the capacity to destroy.

Fig. 21: The view of the ruins from the new Cathedral through the 70ft ‘Screen of Saints and Angels’ etched by John Hutton.


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Interview

• Interview between author and Jack Fleming, Reconciliation Ministry

Team, Coventry Cathedral (Coventry, 17 August 2015).


Appendix

Transcription of Interview between author and Jack Fleming, Reconciliation

Ministry Team, Coventry Cathedral (Coventry, 17 August 2015).

BC: To start, could you just outline to sort of work that you do?

JF: Yeah, sure, it all stems from the destruction of the old cathedral and

the drive to rebuild both the cathedral and communities around, that

led Provost Howard in the wake of the destruction of the old

cathedral, he made a call for forgiveness and reconciliation initially at

that point with Germany looking even then, even quite early on in the

war, looking to time beyond it when we could build relationships and

that led to building up this idea of building a ministry of reconciliation

and so the cross of nails which was made from nails from the ruins

initially they were kind of sent out randomly to people who could be

significant in making a more beautiful world. So people like the

queen and Winston Churchill and faith leaders and most of them had

no response, we sent out a lot in the early years and we completely

lost track of them, so somewhere in the world there are loads of

cross of nails, we don’t know where they are now, but a couple of

German cities did respond and build on it. The first one was Kiel

which was again total, well basically levelled about four years after

Coventry was, in 1945.


BC: There is an interesting link between other cities that have suffered

urban devastation

JF: Yes, it was almost a shared trauma, that both of them together. We,

in 1947, sent Kiel a cross of nails and they responded with the Kiel

stone of forgiveness, I think it’s called. Which is somewhere in the

depths of our archives. Was a stone from one of their destroyed

churches so we were both giving bits of our own, effectively our own

cultural life, physically part of the cathedral the old cross of nails were

all made from bits of the cathedral. Now we’ve run out of nails they

are made in a prison in Germany, which is really cool. So it was about

giving, both places had sacrificed something and they’ve shared that

destruction, so everybody was admitting their role in destruction and

they are victimised, so they are both perpetrators and victims and

that is why behind the altar in the old cathedral it says “Father

forgive”, where as the line in the bible it is taken from says “Father

forgive them”, Jesus on the cross saying to the people who crucified

him “forgive them” but Provost Howard was very strict, about the

fact that it had to be “forgive” because we are all responsible.

BC: That’s interesting, so Spence’s rebuilding and the composition having

the new next to the old was the first indication from my research that

the cathedral had become a symbol of peace and reconciliation,

would it be right to say the ruins themselves were for a long time

prior to the rebuilding a symbol of peace and reconciliation or was it

not until it was framed in that way?


JF: I think the ruins as a symbol probably didn’t have as much currency

until Spence’s design but certainly it was part of the cathedral

community culture as the original design winner was a Gilbert Scott

commission they chucked that out which suggests to me that they

clearly thought it was not saying the right things. It was a big grand

gesture, like Liverpool Cathedral, or Battersea power station

BC: Yes, the plans were to cut the ruins in half, so what do you think the

impact of Spence’s design was, was it a national symbol or

international?

JF: To start with it was quite local, my experience here is that the ruins,

that Coventry as a city feels much more affinity with the ruins than

with the new cathedral, they feel more like part of who they are, the

two are linked but people just the way people pass through it, it’s

more like home for them

BC: It has more historical link to their city

JF: I think it has quite a strong local pull, but the rebuilding was certainly

done with an international side to it, so the roof was funded by

Canada, we have Swedish windows, lots of contributions by

international supporters, the funding and construction was a way of

bringing people together, so I think even from the time when it was

being built it had this international side to it very strongly. And at

that point also Coventry was sending people to Dresden to help

rebuild there so it was an exchange of support


BC: So looking at the ruins today, what role do they play in your work,

are you responsible for taking people to look at them, or show

people around them?

JF: Yes, the cathedral as a whole, they are still part of the cathedral we

can still do services in them, they are still consecrated and every

Friday we say the litany of reconciliation, which is a pattern of prayer

between us and partners in the community of the cross of nails

around the world. In terms of the way the reconciliation uses them

we would see them, we do pilgrimages and we take people who are

interested in reconciliation and give them a tour to include that,

tourists as well get tours around the ruins. But they are, on their own

not that important but in combination with the new cathedral gives it

a different angle because you’ve got the destruction and the rebuild

and you’ve got the progression from the ruins through the west

screens towards Christ in Majesty which is Spence’s big vision and

that sense of God being there in the brokenness as well as in the

glory. Its complete set piece, over-the-topness is very important to

what we do. There’s been a reasonable amount of development of

the ruins around the millennium project, which has more or less

petered out now but over the past five years we’ve been doing

repairs around the edge there has obviously been a lot of focus on

them, fund raising to maintain them and also things like installing

artworks. So the Choir of Survivors was a German artwork, all of the

art in there is about dealing with stuff we’ve done wrong. Choir of

Survivors addresses atrocity. The Reconciliation Statue which was

originally commissioned for Bradford University, but there is a copy

here there’s a copy in the peace garden in Hiroshima , a copy in


Stormont and a copy in Berlin by one of the wall crossings. There is a

chapel of reconciliation that has the names of all the people who died

trying to cross the wall at that point. So it links very strongly to our

continuing need to remember everything we’ve done wrong and

learn from it. Just remembering is no good if you don’t do the

learning from it. So we try to use the ruins as a way of focusing our

action and our engagement and our advocacy so there is a concept,

the Coventry cathedral memorial ruins they were designated as a

memorial to civilian victims of war, I think that happened in 2012, on

the anniversary of the consecration of the new cathedral. And we

draw out six themes from that: victims of sexual violence, land

mines, aerial bombardment, refugees, environmental impact of war.

The idea is that the ruins serve as a focus for those and we’ve got a

vigil service we use occasionally, we try to link it into key memorial

dates, so for example it was the 20th Anniversary of the Chevromitzia

massacre during the Bosnia war about a month ago and that was one

of the worst atrocities since the Second World War and so we

focused on that as a way of trying to engage with mistakes that we

are still making and a lot of it is trying to raise awareness and

outreach work, but also we can hold vigils and we try and link in

these key themes into our prayers in the main cathedral as well.

BC: So there is a capacity for the ruins to metamorphose and be applied

to these as more atrocities are committed?

JF: Because it was obviously destroyed in a very specific set of

circumstances, but destruction and rebuilding but also not forgetting


where you come from is a much more broad and a way of thinking

that can be applied to a lot of different situations

BC: And what do you think about the links to Hiroshima, through the

placement of the reconciliation sculptures, do you have direct

contact or a similar organisation in Hiroshima?

JF: I don’t think there is an equivalent organisation, two weeks ago we

had the lord mayor and the dean hosted a special service in the

chapel of unity rather than the ruins, because of the weather mainly,

and we had the deputy ambassador of Japan and key figures, and

there was a service made up of poetry, music and speaking and

engagements. And they made the peace cranes, you know the paper

cranes. So we still have links and are very much aware, again it is

part of our shared responsibility as part of the allied forces in that

situation

BC: I like that idea, of shared responsibility, I hadn’t thought of it in that

way, two different cities that suffered destruction.

JF: If we were only doing it from the point of view of shared destruction,

destruction is really not comparable, in terms of the scale. I mean

even somewhere like Dresden was far more heavily damaged in the

bombing the Allies undertook than Coventry, so in terms of scale we

actually got off quite lightly.

BC: Yes, that has always been the thing, compared to other countries it

did get off quite lightly so it seems strange that there is this really


deep memorial culture that has come out of the experience of the

war, but actually if it is more than simply remembering destruction

and more about trying to progress forward,

JF: Yes, trying to engage with the world as it is

BC: Do you think the ruins supply a suitable symbol for that?

JF: Yes, and of course the other thing, it was the only English cathedral

that was destroyed – and they had only been a cathedral for 20

years, Coventry as a city has just got its cathedral back after 500

years of not having one and then it loses it again. So I think that must

have had quite a strong impact on collective psyche, a cultural

significance

BC: And do you think it still is – obviously there is not many people that

remember the experiences first hand left – but do you still have

contact with survivors?

JF: We do get visitors who come and say ‘I remember it being built’, and

a lot of them do think of it very fondly. Some less so because at the

time there was effectively a tax on school children – they all had to

bring in 2 pence to contribute. So some of them actually see that

almost in a negative light, and find it quite a hard place to engage

with, because the cathedral was being rebuilt while most of the city

was still in ruins. In some ways that was quite hard, for some people

it was a symbol, it was kind of a big shared thing, but for others it

was ‘the cathedral getting attention while we are all standing here in


the rubble of our destroyed lives’. So, it can be quite challenging to

deal with but I mean most people do think of it positively. And, lots

of people, you come here and you say to people ‘I’m working at

Coventry cathedral now’ and so many people have memories of ‘oh

my great uncle helped build the chapel or something’, ‘he was one of

the glass artists’ that sort of thing. Lots of people seem to have

stories and have affinities with the place. Again, more so with the

new cathedral as a collective enterprise, than with the ruins. But, I

think as the two cathedrals as a whole, you take them together, and

people have a strong link to it.

BC: Do you think though, that as we get further away from the events of

the war, the 20th century architecture heritage of the place might

overtake the ‘Blitz’ heritage?

JF: I think you’re right, and I actually think that is healthy, I mean that it is

quite easy to focus too much and it’s something that we are quite

often guilty of. We focus too much on the blitz history side of things

and lose track of what that means now. And yeah there is also quite a

lot of architectural focus. So, the Basil Spence society is quite strict in

trying to maintain the building in line with his vision. So, it can quite

easily become a time capsule for the 20th century, and that is very

valuable because there aren’t many buildings that will survive in the

way that the cathedral will, hopefully. Hopefully it will survive

because as a cathedral it is likely to have more of a drive to it, than

say tower blocks from a similar era. They are far less likely to survive

in the same way. So, in that way I think it will be quite valuable in 50

years or 100 years time. But definitely, it is very important that we


don’t lose focus on why it matters now. It is very easy to focus too

much on the memorialisation and not on actually doing something.

BC: Just going back to the public art in the ruins, when was ‘the choir of

survivors’ installed?

JF: The choir of the survivors was installed in the early 2010s

BC: And, I only noticed it very recently, but the tomb of the unknown

civilian in the gardens, when did that come about?

JF: I don’t know how old that is…

BC: But it seems to have come out of nowhere

JF: But again, its tying into the idea of our focus on the civilian victims of

war. We have the tomb of the unknown warrior at the cenotaph and I

think it is the idea that this is the civilian equivalent. It is somewhere

that anyone who has lost something as a result of war can focus on

that.

BC: Do you think, just looking to the future, do you think that the ruins

can continue to serve as a strong symbol of these sorts of themes?

JF: I think so, there is a danger of them losing their significance as the

generation that lived through, even the rebuilding, begins to fade

out. And the people who got the stories first hand, there is a lot of

story telling involved and reliving and remembering through stories,


that is quite important. And as that kind of generational link begins

to fade, I think it might be quite easy to lose their significance. Which

is why it is important to continue to focus as something that matters

now. But, even if there specific ‘Anglo-German world war II’

significance begins to fade, it will still be that you have destruction

and rebuilding next to each other. And you will always be able to see

the high alter from the ruins of the cathedral and vice versa. So the

physical symbolism of it will remain, even if the specific details fade. I

think having the two of them together next to each other does make

it a symbolic statement in a way that you wouldn’t get somewhere

like St Andrews Cathedral.

BC: Ok, just to finish off with an awkward question – what do the ruins

‘say’ to you? Or what do you read into them?

JF: I mean, for me probably the most powerful thing is the movement

from the ruins down through the screens towards Christ in majesty.

But the ruins on their own, I do love, and I love the way that they are

a public space even though they are still consecrated. So you have

people effectively just eating lunch in a church, which is brilliant!

That’s the kind of thing that the church should be doing, it should be

out there for the people, which is really inspiring. Also, I love Ecce

Homo, the statue that looks like an Easter Island head.

BC: Right, I think that is everything, thank you.

JF: Great, thanks.

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