COVENTRY, England — Coventry in the English Midlands is famous for at least two things: It was the stage for Lady Godiva’s notorious naked ride on a horse, and in the 1960s it established itself as “U.K.’s Motor City,” the Detroit of Great Britain.
When Lady Godiva took to these streets in the 11th century to protest unfair taxes, there was no car industry. The bicycles, the motorcycles, the roadsters and the taxis would come some 900 years later, as would thousands of engineers and designers drawn to Coventry, about 100 miles north of London.
Today, for motoring enthusiasts, or anyone interested in the 20th-century culture of Britain, Coventry makes it easy to absorb and celebrate its history. In the heart of the city, the Coventry Transport Museum is a tribute to men and machines — there are lots of machines to ogle — but more than that, it’s a history lesson on the effects of two world wars on a city’s civilization.
“So many companies — bicycle makers, the motorcycle industry, automobile makers — started out their production life here that we are uniquely placed not just to tell the story of the industries, but how they shaped the local area,” Elisabeth Chard-Cooper, the museum’s curator, said. “It is the motor city U.K.”
The first British car was built in Coventry by Daimler in 1897, and by the middle of the next century Britain was the second-largest carmaker in the world. The good times lasted into the late 1970s, but today the British auto industry is a shell of its former self. As it has faded in Britain, so, too, has it faded from Coventry, with not much more than the museum recalling the industry’s heyday.
Jaguar/Land Rover has factories in Britain, but the company is owned by Tata of India. BMW’s Mini division puts together vehicles in Oxford, but they’re stuffed with mostly foreign parts and the owners are from Munich. Mention iconic brands and you have Bentley, owned by the Volkswagen Group, and Rolls-Royce, also overseen by BMW.
One of the few remaining automotive stories in Coventry is the London Taxi Company, now rebranded as the London EV Company; it was rescued from dissolution several years ago when it was bought by the Chinese motor giant Geely (Geely also owns Volvo).
But a prouder history is also palpable in Coventry.
At the museum, the designers have integrated an array of audiovisual and interactive material to watch and hear, but it’s the production-set exhibits that steal the show. On the two floors of the museum is a staggering gaggle of homemade machinery that recalls Coventry’s, and the country’s, dominance in automobile development, from Humbers and Hillmans to Austins and Sunbeams to Rileys and Rovers and, most prominently, to Jaguar, which built its sensational, sexy saloons and roadsters on nearby Browns Lane.
And over here is Lady Diana Spencer’s Austin Metro, over there Queen Mary’s state limousine, and back there the Thrust2 and ThrustSSC, the British jet cars that broke land speed records in 1983 and 1997.
And for visitors with the urge to take the wheel of one of those rockets, the museum offers its “4D Land Speed Record” simulator, where adventurous drivers can take a seat, buckle up and try to reach a virtual 760 miles an hour across the Black Rock Desert in Nevada.
While many auto museums will trot out only a small fraction of their collections at once, about 60 percent of the cars owned are out for the public to drool over.
“It’s down to clever design and layout that we have produced such a high percentage in a way that visually looks great,” Ms. Chard-Cooper said.
Besides the machinery, the museum examines the lives and legacies of the industry’s giants. James Starley stars in the exhibit as the inventor who took a primitive French contraption — the velocipede — and refined it to create the bicycle. Starley’s sewing machine factory became an incubator for cycle development, and by the late 1800s 77 companies in and around Coventry were involved in constructing bicycles or bike parts.
Not long after that, encouraged by tradesmen with complementary skills, many bicycle makers — Triumph, Rover, Singer — began experimenting with automobile development.
One of the more affecting encounters centers on the night of Nov. 14, 1940. Coventry that evening was the target of a prolonged aerial attack by the Germans, which they had code-named Moonlight Sonata. About 36,000 bombs were dropped, and a third of the city’s factories were destroyed or badly damaged. (After the war, Coventry and Dresden, the bombed-out city in Germany, became “sister cities,” linked by a common history.)
But even a glance at the postwar cream-colored Jaguars and racing-green Triumphs on display reflects how the city responded by rebuilding. By the 1950s, Britain had become the world’s leading exporter of automobiles. It wouldn’t last.
Exhibits further chronicle the troubles that would plague the industry in Britain by the 1970s. When the European and American auto giants caught up with production, automobile output in Coventry dropped drastically; the city’s top employers cut nearly half of their work force. Britain’s trade unions became incensed over government policies to shift factory locations to other places of high unemployment in the north of England.
But Coventry took an especially hard hit with the closing in 1980 of the Triumph plant. Jaguar built the iconic E-type sports car, designed by Malcolm Sayer, in 1961, but it was finished by 1975, and not long after, foreign carmakers — including Peugeot and Renault, from France, and Sweden’s Volvo and Volkswagen — had gained a firm foothold on Britain’s mobility market.
There is reason for optimism, however. Construction is underway on the National Automotive Innovation Center, a research facility at the nearby University of Warwick that is being funded by the government, Tata, Jaguar/Land Rover and the university, among other supporters. Jaguar executives have said they hope to build electric cars and develop battery technology in Coventry, a prospect they say could create thousands of jobs in the region.