Coventry Had 12-Foot Wide Cycleways In The 1950s

[rebbonk]

Coventry Had 12-Foot Wide Cycleways In The 1950s -- Why Did Britain's Detroit Destroy Them?

It is a myth that the English city of Coventry was rebuilt on a futurist plan only after it was destroyed by wartime bombing raids by Germany’s Luftwaffe. In fact, the city’s pre-war chief engineer and chief architect were arguably more responsible for the destruction of Coventry’s medieval core than the incendiary bombs which rained down on the city in the early 1940s. The pair started to rip out the medieval heart of the city long before the war in order to create a clean and ordered city of Brutalist buildings and a motor-focussed ring road. These technocrats wanted to make Coventry – hub of the domestic motor industry – into Britain’s Detroit, and they had motorways in mind prior to the wartime bombing raids that later, to their joy, enabled their plans.

600 people died in the largest German raid, carried out on 14 November 1940 – the first raid of the Blitz on Britain – but the city’s young and brash Harvard-educated architect later said the destruction wrought by the Nazis had been a “blessing in disguise.”

Academics understand that it was technocrats who did more to reshape Coventry than bombs, but what no academics have yet studied is that postwar Coventry – briefly – had the widest and best-built cycleways in Britain.

Source and more...https://www.forbes.com/sites/carltonreid/2019/01/02/coventry-had-12-foot-wide-cycleways-in-the-1950s-why-did-britains-detroit-destroy-them/#564a2d9a7eb2

[dutchman]

Very interesting Rebbonk!

For those not familiar with the area, this was the view from the Little Park Street end of Ringway St John looking towards London Road. The weaver's cottages in Whitefriars Street running from left to right were all demolished shortly after this photo was taken. On the far left behind the dump truck is the exit from Much Park Street which was later blocked-off to traffic.


This is the view from the Whitefriars Street end looking towards Little Park Street with a row of terraced houses visible on the left in Short Street.


I used those cycle paths regulary on Sundays. Only two sections of the Ring Road were completed that way, the other being Ringway St NIcholas.