The Polish way of rebuilding

Let's make Coventry medieval again

I’m in Warsaw, visiting fellow substacker Ben Sixsmith. The city, as most people probably know, was heavily damaged during the Second World War, and the setting for two of the most heart-breaking acts of heroism in history.

Fifteen months after its Jewish ghetto rose up in a last ditch attempt to avoid annihilation, the people of the city carried out one final act of defiance against Nazi occupation in August 1944. 

The Soviets, having helped to start the war in 1939 with the fourth partition of Poland, deliberately halted their advance and refused to help the city in its torment. Without Russian cooperation, the western allies could do little more than an airlift of weapons and supplies, which was doomed to failure.

The Polish Army and resistance fought bravely - some 20,000 Germans were killed or wounded - but at huge cost. As many as 200,000 Poles, most civilians, were killed in the battle and over 80% of the city destroyed – worse destruction than Hiroshima or Nagasaki. And so the Nazis had carried out their plan to erase the Polish capital — yet this was something the Poles refused to accept, even after 1944

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Today the Old Town is as beautiful as it ever was, and visitors from around the world come to walk its streets - witnesses to perhaps the most remarkable ever story of urban rebirth. 

With the city a pile of rubble and corpses, the post-war communist authorities considered moving the capital elsewhere, and some suggested that the remains of Warsaw be left as a memorial to war, but the civic leaders insisted otherwise - the city would rise again

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The Poles received no outside help in rebuilding their capital, the reconstruction carried out by public donations to the Social Fund for the Rebuilding of the Capital. While builders and construction workers laboured away, local people volunteered to help clear the rubble, with ‘the entire nation builds its capital’ becoming a popular rallying cry. 

Remarkably, as Polish art historian Aleksandra Janiszewska-Cardone wrote last year, the authorities were helped in their efforts to rebuild the old town using the paintings of  Venetian artist Bernardo Bellotto, who had visited Warsaw in the 18^th century before its partition. When the Capital City Reconstruction Office (BOS) presented their plans to the Soviets in late 1945, they included five photographs of Bellotto’s artwork.

Janiszewska-Cardone quoted Małgorzata Omilanowska, a Polish art historian and former minister of culture and national heritage, who described it as ‘the emanation of the dream of a generation of architects experiencing the trauma of war, who built the Warsaw they wanted to love and believed that its residents desired one like it.

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Some things were not quite accurate. The Branicki Palace was mostly destroyed but rebuilt based on a Canaletto work, and today features little statues of lizards and a gorilla eating a banana – but they never actually featured in the original building, the artist had just added them to liven up his picture. Artistic license became reality.

But the artist proved invaluable in restoring the city, and as the Polish writer Leopold Tyrmand put it. ‘From the battlefield of rubble and ruins, Warsaw became once more the old Warsaw, eternal Warsaw’. 

The paintings themselves, previously taken by Napoleon and by Tsar Nicholas I after the uprising in 1831, had been seized by the Nazis but survived the war and can today be found in the Royal Castle, (below) destroyed and only restored in the 1980s. The Castle forms part of a citadel that is today UNESCO listed, part of a beautiful square that is almost entirely reconstructed – except, I noticed, one modernist building opposite the castle which, horror of horrors, prominently displays the legend ‘McDonald’s’.

 

Warsaw isn’t the only European city to rebuild itself in this way. Part of Frankfurt’s Old Town is being reconstructed, the German financial centre in recent years tearing down a 1970s concrete block and replacing it with 15 reconstructed medieval houses.

Similarly the Royal Palace of Dresden, in a city destroyed on the fateful date of 13 February 1945, has been rebuilt as before.

Just over a decade after the war ended, Dresden became a twin town with another city whose name became synonymous with senseless destruction. Indeed, during the conflict a verb briefly entered the German language – Koventrieren – to Coventryise, flatten.

The attack on the Warwickshire city on November 14, 1940 was the first major raid in Britain, carried out in revenge for the RAF bombing of Berlin. More than 400 bombers dropped 500 tons of high explosives and 30,000 incendiary bombs, killing 600 civilians and destroying thousands of houses; although shocking, the British would later respond with far greater ferocity – up to 25,000 were killed in Dresden, mostly civilians who died from asphyxiation during the firestorm that ensued.

Coventry had been an important city since before the Norman Conquest, most famous for the story of local nobleman Lady Godiva riding naked through its streets, a legend that became the inspiration for a popular annual procession.

Its beautiful medieval cityscape led it to be referred to as the ‘English Nuremberg’ and in 1933 J.B. Priestley wrote in English Journey that ‘It is genuinely old and picturesque: the cathedral of St Michael’s, St Mary’s Hall, Ford’s and Bablake Hospitals, Butcher Row, and the Old Palace Yard. You pop round a corner and see half-timbered and gabled houses that would do for the second act of the Meistersinger. In fact, you could stage the Meistersinger – or film it – in Coventry. I knew it was an old place – for wasn’t there Lady Godiva? – but I was surprised to find how much of the past, in soaring stone and carved wood, still remained in the city.’

Architectural historian John Summerson described how ‘Before the war one would meet the bedesmen of Bablake Hospital going to church in Tudor gowns. Many streets were still largely sixteenth and seventeenth century, built for men who made and sold woollen caps to the world outside their Gothic walls or fed or armers and makers and sellers of woollen caps.’ 

Then came the car, which would become a source of the city’s growth – and destruction. The motor industry had arrived in 1896 with the Daimler company, leading the population to treble in the early 20^th century.

By the time that war arrived, the city was an industrial target, with not just motoring but engineering works and a nascent arms industry - in that way the bombing was different to the later Baedeker raids carried out on cultural targets.

The attack was devastating, to the local people and the national psyche, and local historian W.G. Hoskins wrote that ‘For English people, at least, the word Coventry has had a special sound ever since that night’. Yet Coventry also became a byword for how to not to rebuild a city – indeed the city authorities even saw the Blitz as an opportunity to remake the city in their own image.

Coventry forms a chapter in Gavin Stamp’s Britain’s Lost Cities, a remarkable  – if depressing – coffee table book illustrating what was done to our urban centres. Stamp wrote:

British propaganda was quick to exploit this catastrophe to emphasise German ruthlessness and barbarism and to make Coventry into a symbol of British resilience. Photographs of the ruins of the ancient Cathedral were published around the world, and it was insisted that it would rise again, just as the city itself would be replanned and rebuilt, better than before.

But the story of the destruction of Coventry is not so simple or straightforward. … severe as the damage was, a large number of ancient buildings survived the war – only to be destroyed in the cause of replanning the city. But what is most shocking is that the finest streets of old Coventry, filled with picturesque half-timbered houses, had been swept away before the outbreak of war – destroyed not by the Luftwaffe but by the City Engineer. Even without the second world war, old Coventry would probably have been planned out of existence anyway.

In one respect, Coventry had been ready for the attacks… the vision of ‘Coventry of Tomorrow’ was exhibited in May 1940 – before the bombing started. [City engineer] Gibson later recalled that "we used to watch from the roof to see which buildings were blazing and then dash downstairs to check how much easier it would be to put our plans into action."

The Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings had estimated that 120 timber houses had survived the war.. two thirds of these would disappear over the next few years as the city engineer pressed forward with his plans…. A few buildings were retained, but removed from their original sites and moved to Spon Street as a sanitised and inauthentic historic quarter."

Today, whatever integrity the post-war building ever had has been undermined by subsequent undistinguished alterations and replacements. Coventry has been more transformed in the 20th century than any other city in Britain, both in terms of its buildings and street pattern. The three medieval spires may still stand, but otherwise the appearance of England's Nuremberg can only be appreciated in old photographs.

In fact, the destruction had begun before the war. In order to make the city easier for drivers, the west side had been knocked down in the 1930s, the area around Chapel St and Fleet St replaced by Corporation St in 1929-1931. After the war it would become a shopping centre.

Old buildings by Holy Trinity Church were destroyed in 1936-7, and that same year Butcher Row and the Bull Ring were similarly pulled down, the Lord Mayor calling the former ‘a blot in the city’.

Indeed, the city architect Donald Gibson hailed the Blitz as ‘a blessing in disguise. The jerries cleared out the core of the city, a chaotic mess, and now we can start anew.’ He said later that ‘We used to watch from the roof to see which buildings were blazing and then dash downstairs to check how much easier it would be to put our plans into action.’

Gibson’s plan became city council policy in February 1941, with a new civic centre and a shopping precinct inside a ring road. The City Engineer Ernest Ford wanted to preserve some old buildings, including the timber Ford’s Hospital, which had survived the Blitz. Gibson said it was an ‘unnecessary problem’ and in the way of a new straight road.

As with Warsaw, the locals wanted the city restored, but unlike in Poland, people in England didn’t get their way. ‘An Old Citizen’ had written to the local paper back in 1941 that ‘We should like the new Coventry to be something of the old Coventry, and not merely a fourth-rate provincial city on futurist lines.’

In 1945 there was an exhibition of ‘Coventry of the Future’, which was visited by as many as one-quarter of the population. Newspapers suggest most people sided with the view of one letter-writer who pleaded ‘Give us Coventry back as we knew it.’

One local newspaper lamented that: ‘The City Architect has tolerated no barriers, has refused to concern himself unduly with the preservation of ancient features, has disregarded the lines of ancient streets insofar as they complicate his scheme, and has certainly not permitted questions of cost to cramp his inspiration.’

Yet the destruction continued. Priory Row, north of the cathedral, had survived the Luftwaffe but not Gibson. According to the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings, 120 timber houses survived the Blitz, but two-thirds were destroyed by the council under Gibson’s successor Arthur Ling.

Nikolaus Pevsner visited in 1964 and admitted that while the re-planning of Coventry was ‘of international interest’, the new buildings were ‘undistinguished’. And so it is today, with Coventry’s city centre notorious for its ugliness. 

What’s curious is that Poland, living under a communist regime ideologically hostile to the past, was able to restore its city — while in democratic Britain the authorities used the war as an excuse to force their own vision on the populace. Indeed, in my country town planners ended up doing even more damage than the Luftwaffe.

The Economist recently reported that the Blitz was in the long term good for London’s economy, allowing for greater density, although I’m not so sure. Had our predecessors restored Wren’s Square Mile, at least, we would have been eternally grateful for their wisdom. Instead we got… what we now have.

I’m not dismissing the importance of economic growth, but I also suspect that beautiful surroundings make a big enough difference to quality of life that they come to attract investment and wealth, as well as increasing our happiness.

London is big enough to afford the odd ugly square mile, and still has plenty of unspoiled pre-war districts – which also tend to be the neighbourhoods where highly-desired wealthy foreigners move to. The same is true of Warsaw, a large city that has much uninspiring and ugly post-war architecture (although, he whispers, the Stalinist Palace of Culture and Science is rather marvellous).

For smaller, struggling cities I imagine that aesthetic attractions are far more important in an age when so many smaller towns are sinking or struggling.

Perhaps the ‘Old Citizen’ had a point and was wiser than its chief architect when it came to  the city’s best interests. And, although this might sound strange, perhaps it’s not too late. Why not follow Poland’s example and rebuild Coventry as it was? I’m sure plenty of private investors would put up the money, especially as more traditional buildings rise in value at a greater rate, and the scheme would be popular with locals, if perhaps not with architectural critics. Why not make Coventry medieval again?