Encircling an eccentric city centre where medieval streets meet the modern world, this hulking piece of 1970s infrastructure is the subject of 27 poetry films celebrating its bizarre concrete beauty

The urban landscape has long set literary imaginations on fire – but a ring road may not spring to mind as an obvious source of poetic inspiration. In Coventry, however, the overt orbicular oddness of the ring road and its nine junctions, each elbowing the city, has been celebrated in a collaborative homage to concrete and tarmac by nine poets and nine film-makers.

“The ring road reminds me of a huge creature,” mulls Leanne Bridgewater, one of the poets involved in the Disappear Here project, dreamt up by local artist Adam Steiner. “The ring road has a great presence, not dissimilar to the old city walls,” reflects Steiner, “but driving on it reminds me of Scalextric!” The roller-coaster qualities of driving the road are legendary – you can complete the circuit in five minutes.

The story of postwar planning in the UK is often one of false starts and half finishes. Coventry is one of the few places actually followed through, with its new city centre and ring road completed in 1974. Seen from above, the city is as pleasingly circular as a dart board. But you’d have to be a sober shot to hit the bullseye – as its equally circular ring road is tightly drawn around the city centre, creating a remarkable urban landscape.

Within that tight circle lies one of the most architecturally fascinating city centres in Britain, where medieval streets meet the modern world. The mild modernism of Coventry’s immediate postwar rebuild has much in common with cities that suffered similar fiery fates, such as Essen and Rotterdam.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The morning after a bombing raid on Coventry in 1940. Photograph: Fox Photos/Getty Images

The style of its shopping centre is Scandinavian, mixed with a little of Chester’s influence in the double-decker streets. The western section of ring road here was originally intended to have verges, cycle lanes and surface junctions – just as the current vogue is for boulevards and shared use – rather than the grade separation that town planner Colin Buchanan eventually advocated in the 1960s.

The later modernism of the eastern side of Coventry’s city centre, beyond Basil Spence’s cathedral, is altogether tougher and more space-age. Roads literally penetrate buildings and no less than three different structures fly over streets in short order, including the brutalist Britannia hotel by GR Stone and the infamous 1976 Elephant leisure centre.

Here, the ring road stomps gruffly above the city on concrete stilts. “It seemed to represent some things that were subcultural,” says Steiner. At its heart, Disappear Here is set on reframing the perception of a ring road as a piece of prosaic infrastructure associated with traffic, segregation and crime. “We wanted to capture a little bit of the spirit of that older Coventry too,” adds Steiner. “This environment is strange and alien, yet familiar.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Coventry city centre, with St Michael’s Cathedral and the ring road. Photograph: Alamy

As the heart of the British motor industry, it’s unsurprising that the West Midlands is home to a number of elaborate ring roads. Wolverhampton has a tight dual carriageway circuit (which homeless man Josef Stawinoga camped out on for three decades) while Stourbridge has a bizarre one-way ring road akin to a gigantic roundabout.



Birmingham’s famous Queensway, known as “the concrete collar”, is being slowly downgraded. Its labyrinthine Masshouse Circus junction was removed in 2002 to provide land for speculative property development. The same thing is happening at Paradise Circus, on which the much-missed Birmingham central library once sat. Hamburg, Seoul, Medellín, Madrid, Boston, Seattle and San Francisco have also advocated removing or burying highways to free up space and make pedestrians’ lives easier.

As these eccentric and outdated environments vanish worldwide, a new generation is increasingly interested in documenting them. They’ll need to be quick: in 2015, subways that threaded south through Coventry’s ring road to its impressively airy Grade II-listed train station were torn out. The transformation of this part of the city continues apace. The Friargate development will add several office towers and a hotel surrounding the railway station, while the £300m city centre south project will increase retail space around the postwar shopping nucleus – and potentially lead to the loss of modernist buildings.

“The ring road somewhat restricts the city, it doesn’t allow anything out,” says film-maker Emilia Moniszko, who moved to Coventry from Poland and collaborated with Bridgewater on one of the poetry films. “The road is a ring – but it’s a forced marriage,” echoes Anthony Owen, another of the poets involved in the project.



Alice in Covland, a film by Leanne Bridgewater and Moniszko, mixes Donny Darko gloom with people dancing on overpasses and running through subways to Bridegwater’s refrain “I’m late, I’m late - for a very important date.”



“Concrete structures convey quite a romantic ideology,” says Moniszko. “We’re trying to demonstrate this with a rabbit who’s lost in Coventry. He keeps trying to find himself, trying to find potential and purpose.” At one point the rabbit amusingly checks out hoardings advertising a rising residential development near the road. “The rabbit can run all it wants,” Bridgewater adds, “but the road is a circle so we just go round and round.”

Getting lost crops up a lot in the poems, as do subways. Poet Richard Houguez and film-maker Dora Mortimer’s piece lingers on the neon lighting you find in such underpasses. Film-maker Ben Cook and poet Sarah James compared the whooshing car headlights along the ring road to the Sherborne river which runs under the city, and cuts across the road, but which the council is planning to open up in the future.

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Motorways and ring roads aren’t the most obvious subject for poets – though Simon Armitage was inspired by the M62 and Lorna Dee Cervantes by California’s Freeway 280. “It’s a hard sell to get people interested in what’s in front of them – this concrete superstructure,” says Steiner. “But the poets have re-imagined and re-presented what’s under our noses. It’s part of the sense maybe of renewed optimism in the city right now.”

Armitage’s poem, Horses, M62, talks of a nag on the hard shoulder: “It bolts, all arse and tail through a valley of fleet saloons.” Cervantes paints a vivid picture of the eponymous northern Californian artery and the life underneath it: “But under the fake windsounds of the open lanes, in the abandoned lots below, new grasses sprout, wild mustard remembers, old gardens come back stronger than they were.”

Brave flaneurs find unusual enjoyment in these apparently oppressive spaces. Douglas Smith’s unique 1970 fountain sculptures under the road at Volgograd Place must have impressed when they worked. JG Ballard would have approved of these concrete islands where danger and solitude co-exist, where The Clash and The Specials found inspiration. But their days must surely be numbered.



If it survives, Coventry’s ring road will live as one unlikely symbol of this multi-faceted place, which is bidding for 2021’s UK city of culture. “I enjoy standing underneath the ring road, listening to the cars,” Bridgewater reflects. “This is Coventry’s version of listening to the sea.”

Disappear Here will launch on Thursday 16 March at the Box, Fargo Village. Follow Guardian Cities on Twitter and Facebook to join the discussion, and explore our archive here