Send yourself to Coventry, Britain s underrated Capital of Culture, in 2021
Can the original Ghost Town, bombed into oblivion and left on the post-industrial scrap heap, pull off a City of Culture year?
The ruins of the old cathedral
Credit: Getty
“Nothing, like something, happens anywhere,” wrote Philip Larkin, in ‘I Remember, I Remember’, one of the few poems he penned about Coventry, his birthplace.
The poet’s memories of a humdrum upbringing probably chime with many people’s preconceptions about Coventry. It’s not only that the city is in the Midlands – that inter-zone between the more clearly profiled North and South. It also plays second fiddle to bold, brassy Birmingham up the road, lacks the honeypot attractions of nearby Warwick or Stratford upon Avon, and while it doesn’t technically belong to the blurred, sprawling conurbation that includes Wolverhampton, Dudley and Walsall, most people think it does – not least because, speeding through the regio
Walking through the lawn that separates the Menil Collection and its park to the east from the Rothko Chapel in Houston’s Montrose neighborhood, I am not particularly struck by the type of transcendent beauty for which I am told to prepare myself. There is a group doing yoga on the lawn, everyone spaced 6 feet apart on colorful mats. People read books and lower their masks to chat. A docent wanders around the main attraction, between the Chapel’s entrance and Barnett Newman’s “Broken Obelisk” sculpture outside. It’s all fairly serene and pleasant. But the building itself, one of the most important artworks in the country, isn’t remarkable to me at first; from the exterior it looks not unlike an elementary school gymnasium. Until I walk inside.