Cobden Street, Foleshill, Coventry

Image: © A J Paxton Taken: 26 Aug 2021

This view shows Cobden Street looking south towards Red Lane; the block of flats in the distance is in Hillfields. Cobden Street was laid out in the 1850s as part of a development by the Coventry and Warwickshire Artizans Freehold Land Society. For more on this society see Image David Fry & Albert Smith suggest that a sense of the Society's members' political views can be gained from the street names they chose. Cobden refers to Richard Cobden, the radical and Liberal politician who formed the Anti-Corn Law League along with John Bright; the land society also laid out a Bright Street nearby. The League was a free trade movement that campaigned to end the protectionist corn laws, which taxed imported wheat to the benefit of landowners but at the cost of increased bread prices. Cobden & Bright succeeded in abolishing the corn laws in 1846, with belated support from the Tory prime minister Sir Robert Peel, after whom another of the streets is named. Cobden was later responsible for the 1860 Cobden-Chevalier free trade treaty with France, which led to the collapse of the Coventry ribbon weaving industry and the ruin of many local people, but the street name endured. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Cobden The development of the estate proceeded slowly, and many of the houses in this photo may date from later in the 19th century or even early 20th century, though the addition of insulating cladding in the 2010s has obscured many of the architectural clues; see the discussion in Fry, D & Smith, A, The Coventry we have lost: Forgotten Foleshill, Simanda Press, Berkswell, pp91-92. The area also suffered heavily from bombing in the second world war.

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