A Day in coventry

	Tourist Information Office, Priory Row	Priory Gardens
	Trinity Church with bombed Cathedral behind it	Priory Gardens
	Priory Gardens	Old Cathedral bombed by Germans in Blitz during WW2
	Section of old Cathedral showing remains of burnt stonework	Bayley Lane, Cathedral on left and St Mary's Guildhall on right
	Original door on old Cathedral	St Mary's Guildhall courtyard. Served as a prison to Mary Queen of Scots and HQ for Henry VI in the War of The Roses.
	St Mary's Guildhall Courtyard	Guildhall main chamber. Shows Roundhead Armour from Civil War
	Room off main chamber, Guildhall. Table in here dates from 1610	Oak fireplace in room off main chamber
	Main chamber large stained glass windows, opposite side has similar	The main window at the end of the Guildhall main chamber
	Golden Cross public house, Pepper Lane dated 1583	Medieval Street. Spon Street.
	Unfortunately some of the buildings are covered on Kebab signs and are not really worthy of images of England's Middle Ages. This one is better.	Spon Street looking towards town end

St Mary's Guildhall. One of the finest mediaeval guildhalls in England, it stands on the other side of Bayley Lane from the ruins of Coventry Cathedral and has stood at the heart of Coventry since the 1340s. The Great Hall dates from the late 14th and early 15th century and houses a fine tapestry dating from 1500. The Mary Queen of Scots Room is so named because of the imprisonment of the Scottish Queen here in 1569. It also has associations with George Eliot and William Shakespeare.

Cathedral. Coventry’s earliest cathedral, dedicated to St Mary, was founded as a Benedictine community by Leofric, Earl of Mercia, and his wife Godiva in 1043. Built on the site of a former religious house for nuns, its sheer size is some indication of the wealth which Coventry acquired in the middle ages. In 1539, with the dissolution of the monasteries, the See of Coventry and Lichfield was transferred to Lichfield and the former cathedral fell into decay. Only in 1918 was the modern diocese of Coventry created in its own right, and the church of St Michael designated as its cathedral. The majority of the great ruined churches and cathedrals of England are the outcome of the violence of the dissolution in 1539. On the night of 14 November 1940, the city of Coventry was devastated by bombs dropped by the Luftwaffe. The Cathedral burned with the city, having been hit by several incendiary devices.