Coventry at War & Peace: Stoney Stanton Road, looking north from Canal Bridge no. 4

Image: © A J Paxton Taken: 16 Aug 2021

This is another photo of Stoney Stanton Road and Coventry Peace House (see also Image] and Image]), taken during a walk around Foleshill in August 2021 with the Coventry Society, led by David Fry, author of The Coventry we have lost: Forgotten Foleshill (Simanda Press, Berkswell, 2018). On the walk we discussed this well-known photograph https://www.warwickshirerailways.com/lms/miscfr2080.htm of a naval gun being transported on the Foleshill branch railway across Stoney Stanton Road from the Coventry Ordnance Works. The track crossed the road in the foreground of this geograph photo. The Ordnance Works, which closed in the 1920s, stood behind the row of houses (now painted yellow & white) that are now the Coventry Peace House housing co-op, and it occupied much of the land between the canal and Red Lane. The photo of the naval gun and its onlookers is reproduced in Forgotten Foleshill on p89, where it is dated June 1912. To the right, beyond the railway, can be seen a row of three-storey ribbon-weavers' houses with their distinctive 'top-shop' windows on the top floor. From their position these are clearly the two-storey Peace House buildings. Fry & Smith comment, "Almost all these houses have gone but a few are still standing but with only the bottom two levels remaining as their top-shop storey has been removed." (p89). This removal of the top-shop storey happened elsewhere, for example at the Albion Buildings on Attleborough Road in Nuneaton (see here https://nuneatonmemories.wordpress.com/2013/07/09/silk-ribbon-weaving/ ). It is possible that this was a result of wartime bomb damage, as Stoney Stanton Road suffered severely in the second world war, and the former Three Horseshoes public house (situated behind the trees beyond Peace House) lost most of its upper storey as a result. In memoriam Penny Walker (1950-2021), peace and solidarity activist and founder of Coventry Peace House: see this obituary https://www.indcatholicnews.com/news/42287 .

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