The city is one of only 16 to secure the award over three year
Coventry has been awarded £1.5million of funding that will provide a major boost to the city’s culture and tourism – including new events and art commissions.
The city is one of only 16 to secure the award over three years from Heritage Lottery Fund and Arts Council England as part of the Great Place Scheme.
The full programme of projects will now be given the go ahead for development and includes: a major new arts commission for Coventry Cathedral in 2018, festivals to bring the city centre to life including a pilot Shop Front Festival, and projects which celebrate Coventry’s medieval and modern architecture.
It will also include new city trails and artist-designed mapping; a theatre project looking at the importance of the workplace in bringing cultures together in the city; plans for a new tourism strategy and website for the city; and a national conference at Coventry University on managing cultural and heritage assets.
Many of the city’s arts groups have been involved in developing the bid for Great Place funding including Talking Birds, Shop Front Theatre, Historic Coventry, Culture Coventry, and the Photo Archive Miners whose successful Masterji exhibition at Fargo Village has inspired one of the first projects in Great Places.
A Masterji publication will kick-off a new project to collect archive film and photography from two of Coventry’s most diverse and vibrant streets, Foleshill Road and Far Gosford Street. Starting late 2017, the project will be led by the team who produced Imagine Hillfields and Masterji - a photographic project which moved so many of its 2,000 visitors and is now on display in Mumbai.
Three of the awards backers are coming together in a major project to examine Coventry as a ‘Work Place’.
Led by the University of Warwick with partners Culture Coventry and the Belgrade Youth Theatre, it will look at oral histories and records from Coventry’s manufacturing and engineering history and how Coventry’s industry has formed the place we live.
"One of only sixteen cites", so that's everyone who applied then?
