TRAVELANDLEISURE.COM (^55)
EXPERIENCES
by craftspeople haunted by their experiences
but ready to bring the technologies of military
hardware to a new and better purpose. The
West Screen, standing between new and
old cathedrals, between hope and anguish,
swirls with raucous angels who look skeletal,
enraged, triumphant.
The rest of the city is harder to befriend, but
the more I learned, the more I admired. The
trick is the same as my writing exercise: ask
who built it like that. Why? What were their
hopes and inspirations? How was the world,
the country, the city, the street in those days?
Which hands shaped it, which feet have known
it, which dreams and fears ghost its windows
and doors? To whom might this building have
seemed beautiful, and why?
For now, most of us have to stay local. If we
are to see anything new, it will be the familiar
made strange. I won’t pretend that a new way
of looking is any permanent substitute for new
places to see, but maybe we can learn to see
better while we wait.of rebuilding Britain was huge and the resources
were limited.
It’s easy to admire the new cathedral,
a stunning answer to the question asked
across Europe in those days about what to
do with sites of trauma. European towns
and villages have always been built around
churches, so what do communities do after
the church is bombed or burned out or has
become the site of an atrocity? If left as a
memorial, there’s a wound at the town’s heart,
a constant reminder of what was lost when
you’re only trying to buy potatoes. If rebuilt
entirely, as in the city of Dresden, the trauma
is denied, repression planted.
In Coventry, the old cathedral stands
roofless, its sandstone stumps rain-sculpted,
the traceries of stained glass holding only
sky. But at an angle to the ruin, pushed out of
the correct east-west alignment by it, stands
Basil Spence’s new cathedral, a hymn to the
new materials of concrete and plate glass. I
love it because it’s the creation of war, madeTAL0620_E_Coventry.indd 55 FINAL 4/21/20 7:26 PM