I pray you, let us satisfy our eyes
With the memorials and the things of fame
That do renown this city.
—William Shakespeare, Twelfth Night

On the night of November 14, 1940, the ancient city of Coventry was firebombed and one of the finest assemblages of medieval buildings in Europe vanished. The following morning, the Provost of the Cathedral, the Very Reverend Richard Howard, traced the words “Father forgive” on the charred surface of the ruined walls of the fifteenth-century cathedral, and vowed that there would be no revenge or retaliation. He counted neither on Bomber Harris nor on post-war British architects.

The latter, in particular, have now fully revenged themselves upon a past that they cannot emulate, approach, or equal, much less surpass, an incapacity more evident in Coventry than anywhere else known to me. The city is now a festival, an orgy, a bacchanalia of British architectural and town-planning incompetence, inhumanity, brutality, bad taste, and the ideological espousal of the ugly, no doubt with a good dose of municipal corruption thrown in. Modern Coventry is to the eye what an abattoir is to the nose, and no person of the most minimal aesthetic sensibility could be other than horrified by the inhuman design and execution of the rebuilt city, in which cars race along highways raised on concrete pillars between dilapidated Le Corbusian-blocks, while mere humans are relegated to filthy and cold subterranean passages and shopping precincts where muggers and rapists may