Coventry Corporation council housing, Sheriff Avenue, Canley

Image: © A J Paxton Taken: 26 May 2023

These houses were built in 1940-41 to designs by the City Architect's Department under the newly appointed Donald Gibson. They are contemporary, therefore, with the large air raids on Coventry and Gibson's first plans for a modern shopping precinct to be built as part of the reconstruction of the destroyed city centre. These houses are in a modernist style, too, with flat roofs and plain brick walls, although most have since been rendered and the windows replaced. They were among the first council houses to be built in Canley, which was to become a large housing estate on the western edge of the city. Other houses built by the city in this area at the same time had more conventional pitched-roof designs. See Coventry: The making of a modern city by Jeremy Gould & Caroline Gould, p82, at the Historic England site https://historicengland.org.uk/images-books/publications/coventry-making-of-modern-city-1939-73/ . Similar houses on the opposite side of Sheriff Avenue can be seen at Image

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