IMAGES TAKEN NEAR TO
Bradney Green, CV4 8PD

There are around two hundred of these houses in Canley, a post-1945 Coventry council estate; for more information about them, see Image], which links to some other examples depicted on Geograph, from various parts of Britain. In brief, they were an ingenious attempt to turn metal-bashing war industries into peacetime makers of prefabricated housing, to address an acute housing shortage at a time when labour, and especially skilled building labour, was also in short supply. The architect Frederick Gibberd and the engineer Donovan Lee designed a steel house, with steel panels set in a steel frame, to be made by the British Iron & Steel Federation (BISF), in prefabricated parts that could be assembled easily. The right-hand house appears little changed, with steel panels and steel-framed windows visible - a well-preserved historic building, but a rather chilly one to live in, I suspect - the much-modified left-hand house looks much cosier.

Around two hundred of these houses were built in Canley after 1945, using prefabricated steel frames and panels made by the British Iron & Steel Federation, an ingenious solution to the postwar housing shortage. See Image] for a view of a pair of these houses, and Image] for the back story.

An industrial area.

These blocks are all grey pebbledash which gives them quite a grim look. The have a small area of grass round each block. The windows have recently been replaced with UPVC double glazing. This block contains numbers 395 to 417 which would indicate 23 flats in each block. The logo on the new plastic house number sign indicates that the flats belong to Whitefriars Housing the largest social housing association in Coventry.

There are eight blocks of flats on Charter Avenue the same as these. They are in two groups of four set into the trees of Park Woods.

Canley forms part of the block of land, around 20,000 acres, that Coventry Corporation bought in 1926 from the Leigh family of Stoneleigh Abbey. From the 1940s it was developed with council housing, forming a linear estate extending east to west along Charter Avenue, and providing affordable housing amidst open spaces to industrial workers and their families. These four storey blocks of flats are typical of Coventry council housing from the 1950s and early 1960s. The adjoin Park Wood, one of the Stoneleigh Estate woods that was preserved by the city council. This juxtaposition of housing and woods, often council estates and ancient woodland, is very characteristic of the urban landscape of Canley and Tile Hill on the western edge of the city. Ruth Cherrington, a historian who grew up in Canley, charts the rise and fall of this industrial community in a three-part blog at the Municipal Dreams site: see https://municipaldreams.wordpress.com/2015/11/24/canley_estate_coventry/ , https://municipaldreams.wordpress.com/2015/12/01/the-canley-estate-coventry-building-the-community/ and https://municipaldreams.wordpress.com/2016/02/02/canley-today-not-a-reassuring-neighbourhood/ .

In Marler Road