Sutherland House, viewed from the towpath of the Coventry Canal

Image: © A J Paxton Taken: 26 Aug 2021

Sutherland House was built in the early 1930s as part of the Courtaulds site, a large textile factory devoted mainly to the manufacture of rayon, an artificial fibre derived from wood pulp. Like the better known Courtaulds buildings on Foleshill Road, it would have been faced with red brick, but this was later covered with rendering. Courtaulds closed its Coventry factory in the late 1980s-early 1990s, as textile production moved to south-east Asia where labour and production costs were lower. The Courtaulds textile assets were subsequently bought by the Akzo Nobel and Sara Lee corporations. Sutherland House is now an office block and has now been painted a warm brick red, which evokes the red brick of its neighbours. For a timeline of Courtaulds in Coventry, see Grace's Guide to British Industrial History here https://www.gracesguide.co.uk/Courtaulds and here https://www.gracesguide.co.uk/Courtaulds_Textiles . See also the Coventry Canal Conservation Area Appraisal 4th July 2012 at the Coventry City Council website at https://www.coventry.gov.uk/ . I wanted to stand further back to avoid the converging verticals in this photo, but had I done so I would have fallen into the canal.

Images are licensed for reuse under creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0