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 region on the M6, no one can make head nor tail of anything that resembles a city centre.