On Wednesday 10th June, BBC Four broadcast a documentary called “Coventry Cathedral: Building for a New Britain“, which told some of the story of the building of the new St Michaels Cathedral, against the backdrop of the wider rebuilding of Coventry.
In what is a welcome change for this sort of documentary, instead of having ‘talking heads’ appearing throughout the programme, when people of today were interviewed we don’t see them but archive footage of the 1950s and 1960s There is a lot of that so not only can you see snapshots of the rebuilding of Coventry in the 1950s and 1960s (interestingly St Marys Guildhall had tarps on the roof in the ’50s shots, just like it does in the ones from today), but you can quite a few parts of the city – like all the houses on Priory Street – which survived the Blitz, but would succumb to the town planners.