Under the ring road, just north of Coventry’s city centre, there are a series of murals. Faded and streaked with water damage and pigeon droppings they show hands shaking across the ocean in what would once have been bright, cheerful colours. On a grimy concrete pillar you can still just about read the explanation for their existence on a scratched and faded plaque.

This is Volgograd Place, named in 1972 when Mikhail Zolotaryov, the deputy mayor of the city formerly known as Stalingrad, one of Coventry’s many twin cities, came here on a mission of peace and reconciliation.

Volgograd Place is still described on a Russian website as “a pleasant green space with seats and fountains”. You can’t help feel that any Russian visitors would be so appalled by its state that the twin relationship would be ruined forever.

If anything, it could serve as a bleak memorial to the concept of twin towns. Most of Coventry’s 26 twins don’t even have the dubious honour of a broken patch of concrete under a flyover. Across Europe the relationships have fallen into a state of disrepair, with some towns even breaking off official twin contacts. One was Doncaster, where in 2009, “Britain’s most gloriously un-PC super mayor” Peter Davies, ditched the town’s agreements with five towns in China, France, Germany, Poland and the US, saving he claimed, £4,000 a year.

Volgograd Place, Coventry. Photograph: Trevor Baker

Perhaps more seriously, there have been moves to ditch twinning arrangements as a sign of disapproval with unpleasant political regimes. Milan broke things off with St Petersburg in 2012 after the city introduced homophobic Russian legislation against the “propaganda of homosexuality” among minors.

Other cities, such as Los Angeles, debated taking the same action. Across Europe there are still around 40,000 twin arrangements but even when less controversial, they’re often seen as irrelevant at best, or at worst an expensive perk for local politicians. As Peter Davies put it after his cuts: “The idea that cultural links have been lost is nonsensical. Only about a dozen people ever benefited from these trips. I can see that it arose out of altruistic motives after the war, but it just became about junkets.”

Yet, is it possible that when done right, twinning is more influential, and much more beneficial, than many people realise?

Coventry’s association with the idea began the morning after the worst night in its history, 14 November 1940. After 12 hours of bombing by the Luftwaffe, with 554 people dead and three quarters of the city centre’s housing destroyed, the Provost, or senior priest, Richard Howard, wrote “Father Forgive” in chalk on the scorched back wall of the ruined cathedral.



“At the time it was like, ‘You must be joking mate’,” says local composer and arts manager Derek Nisbet, who’s been closely involved with Coventry’s twinning movement.

That Christmas, Howard went further and declared on the radio that, after the war, he would work with those who’d been enemies, “to build a kinder, more Christ-child-like world.” This led directly to the twinning with German towns that had been devastated by allied bombing, Kiel (in 1947) and Dresden (1956). But even before that Coventry already had the world’s first twin city: Stalingrad.

In 1942 Stalingrad was facing annihilation in the worst battle of the second world war. In Coventry, a large left-wing movement was agitating for Britain to provide more help to the Soviet Union. Margaret Smith, the granddaughter of then mayor Emily Smith, remembers that her grandmother used to receive petitions from communists calling for a “second front” to be opened. As if Churchill and his generals would have taken advice from a female Labour mayor in the West Midlands.

War-torn Stalingrad, 1942. Photograph: Rex/Shutterstock

The town itself, however, made remarkable efforts to send aid. On one occasion 830 people paid six pence each to sign a tablecloth which was sent to the city with the message: “Little help is better than big sympathy.”

“It seems like a group of women in Coventry looked at a map and saw that Stalingrad was a place that was similar in size to Coventry and that also made tractors,” says Nisbet, “so it became this exchange of goodwill.”

Despite being involved in Britain’s own struggle for survival, the people of Coventry raised £4,516 for mobile x-ray units for the Red Army – around £203,000 in today’s prices. Even children were involved.

“I was about nine,” says Smith, “and me and my friend had a stall selling things for Stalingrad. I remember my friend’s father wasn’t happy about it because he was conservative, but he still gave us a great big onion to sell.”

In response, 36,000 women in Stalingrad signed an album that was sent to Coventry. Then in 1944 an official “bond of friendship” was created between the two cities, even though by that time, only an estimated 9,796 citizens survived in Stalingrad’s rubble.

Most people felt that the point of twinning was to try and create relationships

The bond, Coventry’s town clerk hoped, “would find its manifestation in such matters as the mutual exchange of visits … the establishment of pen friendships … and the exchange of literature and information”.

Over 60 years later this series of almost painfully humble suggestions is exactly what most imagine when they think of twinning. It’s sometimes forgotten that it was a very English response to genocide and mass destruction.

Remarkably, the bond between Coventry and Stalingrad – renamed Volgograd in 1961 – endured throughout the coldest moments of the Cold War. Even in 1981, when Leonid Brezhnev was boosting Soviet military spending and Thatcher was steering the UK to the right, a Coventry mayor went out to Volgograd and planted a tree in Memorial Park. This, perhaps surprisingly, doesn’t seem to have aroused the same kind of concerns about the Soviet Union’s human rights record that we might see today. Most people felt that the point of twinning was to try to create relationships in order to make it harder to create the hate and division necessary for war.

Crucially, the link between Coventry and Stalingrad was never supposed to be about politicians, it was supported by ordinary people, mostly women.

The issue of how to create links between communities and individuals without endorsing political regimes remains problematic. Even so, there are those who still think that twinning agreements can make a difference to life in our cities. This could be even more true in the case of countries that don’t agree on a political level. In 2014, to celebrate the original bond of friendship, Volgograd Children’s Orchestra visited Coventry and performed a piece of music, Twin Song, written by Nisbet. It could have been disastrous timing, as relations between Russia and the west were at the lowest they’d been since the cold war.

The orchestra travelled soon after Russia annexed Crimea. “I was a little bit worried about hearing some questions from people about politics. But luckily there was nothing like that,” says orchestra leader Yuri Ilynov. “We only heard nice things about the orchestra.”

People from Coventry have been similarly impressed by the kindness shown to them in Volgograd, whatever the political climate.

“Our hosts were very hospitable,” says Brian Winstanley of Coventry’s Rotary Club, who visited in 2014. “We never got into political matters, or if we did it was just a wry smile and, ‘the time to make money was 10 or 15 years ago’.”

One line in Twin Song was inspired by a visit that Nisbet and his co-writer Peter Cann made to a primary school. A 10-year-old boy made the point that “it’s better to be twins, than to be cold to each other”.

Although Nisbet has some sympathy with those who suggest breaking off agreements that no longer serve their purpose, his idea is that twinning should go back to its radical roots. If Coventry managed to twin with a Soviet city in 1944 and with a German city in 1947, is there a case for reinventing the idea for the modern world?

“Let’s find new twins that are more challenging,” he says. “When we were growing up we thought of Russia as this mysterious, anonymous threat. I didn’t know any Russians. But the kids here who’ve met Russians and seen that they’re the same as them have overcome that. At one point Russia was the ‘other’ and if we think about who is the ‘other’ now,” he pauses and half-seriously suggests, “maybe we should be twinning with somewhere in Syria.”

Coventry’s The Specials in the 1980s. Was post-punk idealism inspired by the idealism of Coventry’s post-war generation? Photograph: Eugene Adebari/Rex/Shutterstock

He’s not the first one to suggest going for the more challenging twin. Dundee twinned with the West Bank city of Nablus in 1980, while in 2011 a Conservative councillor proposed twinning Royston in Hertfordshire with Benghazi in Libya.

The benefits of twinning can go both ways. According to Coventry’s lord mayor Michael Hammon, Chinese investment in a new taxi factory outside the city was “more or less a direct consequence,” of contacts made through the twin relationship with Jinan in eastern China.

It would inject new life and purpose if all wealthy twin towns took on a poorer town and did something to try and help Jerry Dammers

But what effect did twinning have on Coventry’s people? Those who lived there in the 1970s and early 80s might scoff at the idea that it helped it become, as it says on the road signs, a “city of peace and reconciliation”. According to professor of sociology Nirmal Puwar, who grew up in the city: “Racism was rife. There were a number of serious attacks, and the racist skinhead movement was feared on an everyday basis.”

Yet, it was also the place where record label 2 Tone’s mixed race groups formed a bridge between reggae, punk and skinhead culture, inspiring people around the world. Is it fanciful to imagine a connection between the idealism of Coventry’s post-war generation and the post-punk idealism of the early 80s?

Jerry Dammers, founder of The Specials and of 2 Tone, is dismissive of the idea that their battle against racism had anything to do with twinning. “It’s far fetched to compare it with bringing Germany into the mainstream after the war,” he says. “But I guess 2 Tone was trying to fight racism and change minds at the same time.”

However, there is one interesting link between the two eras. After the Battle of Monte Cassino in 1944, a junior British officer was reading the Bible in a casualty bay, having lost part of his foot to a landmine. Beside him was a Luftwaffe pilot.

“I, too, read the Bible,” the pilot told him, as he later recounted in his autobiography, “and I have found some comfort in it since my wife and two sons were killed in an RAF raid on Hamburg.”

After the war the officer joined the church and, in the late 60s and early 70s, he was a canon at Coventry Cathedral. Passionate about reconciliation, he even travelled to Dresden to help with the planning of a new cathedral to replace the one destroyed by the RAF.

His name was Horace Dammers, Jerry Dammers’ dad. The musician, who now leads Jerry Dammers’ Spatial AKA Orchestra, wasn’t aware of the city’s history as a pioneer of twinning, but he’s enthusiastic about his home town’s claim to fame.

“That’s a fantastic part of the city’s legacy,” he says. “I think Coventry should publicise that and support the movement’s continuation. It would inject new life and purpose if all wealthy twin towns took on a poorer town, maybe in the third world, and did something to try and help it and learn from it.”

Learning from one another was supposed to be what twinning was all about. Nisbet’s colleague, cultural planner Carol Brown, believes that we suffer from the delusion that, in an age of easy travel, we know the rest of the world much better than we really do. She is an unabashed Russophile and her trips to Volgograd have convinced her that the twinning arrangement between the two cities is vital in our fraught times.

“We don’t understand Russia at all,” she says. “Over 20 million people died there in the second world war but people aren’t aware of the suffering. It makes me angry when people make assumptions about things that they’ve read in the papers when they don’t know any of the history.”

She groans when I mention Volgograd Place. “It’s so embarrassing,” she says. “I’m always ashamed to take people from Volgograd there. It’s disgusting. When it was first built it had water features and landscaping. It’s such a shame.”

Still, if the relationship between Coventry and Volgograd has survived the second world war, the cold war and now the stand-off between the west and Putin, it should be able to survive a bit of neglected concrete under a flyover.

The continuing cultural exchanges between the two cities are a symbol that, whatever’s going on at a political level, ordinary people can still communicate, help and inspire each other, just as they did in 1944.

And, at the time of writing, there are signs of restoration work about to begin at Volgograd Place. Perhaps, at last, Coventry’s long international friendship will get the landmark it deserves.

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