Architecture minister Barbara Follett is to review English Heritage’s decision to list Coventry’s 1950s market building amid claims the listing threatens US firm Jerde Partnership’s £1 billion city centre masterplan. The circular 1957 building, designed by the city architecture department, was grade II listed in June on the advice of EH, which highlighted its ‘remarkable’ interior and rooftop car park. But following protests led by Coventry MPs Geoffrey Robinson and Jim Cunningham, Follett said she would look again at the listing.
The city council is keen to proceed with redevelopment. It claims the majority of the 3,000 residents who visited an exhibition on the plans were broadly in favour of the biggest regeneration planned for the city in 50 years. Jerde’s 20-year plan for Coventry includes a striking egg-shaped public building, 200,000sq m of retail space, new parks and residential and office blocks on a 66ha site. But Jon Wright, Coventry caseworker for the Twentieth Century Society, accused the council of being “complicit” in the incremental destruction of the city’s original post-war masterplan.
He said: “Architecture from the fifties is still struggling to be understood. Coventry is utterly unique. There’s no reason to think if cities like Coventry had been left as set pieces of post-war architecture, art and design they wouldn’t, in 70 years’ time, have come to be viewed on a par with Bath.”
