Destruction and renewal in Coventry, the phoenix

Lady GODIVA, the wife of Leofric, Earl of Mercia, is said to have ridden naked through the streets of Coventry in the 11th century.

Today, the city of 300,000 has little more than legend to divert tourists or suggest the quaintness of medieval England. It sits about 100 miles northwest of London, part of the sprawling, unlovely, industrial Midlands. Weaving and watchmaking once dominated its economy, then bicycle and automobile manufacturing. That yielded to munitions factories during World War II, making Coventry a prime target for the German Luftwaffe.

On previous trips to the area, I’d gotten lost in the city’s dispiriting, gray suburbs, discouraging me from visiting again. But last year while researching an article on the German city of Dresden, which was destroyed by Allied aerial bombardment in early 1945, I read about the German attack on Coventry.

For about 11 hours beginning on the night of Nov. 14, 1940, German planes dropped a lethal load of conventional explosives and incendiary bombs that turned Coventry into an inferno, consuming 60,000 buildings and killing about 550 people.

The death toll was modest compared with the hundreds of thousands thought to have died in Dresden a few years later. It was retaliation, some say, for Coventry. But the Coventry raid had several distinctions. It was early in the war, so it was the first English town to suffer massive aerial bombardment. It left the city without its landmark Gothic cathedral, though a handful of church members fought valiantly to save it.

Finally, the Coventry blitz marked the debut of a horrible new weapon: the firestorm, generated when intensely hot flames started by incendiary bombs create an oxygen vacuum at ground level, into which great waves of fire rush. It proved so effective that the Germans coined the word “coventrated” for what happened that autumn night in the English Midlands.

When I returned to Coventry last month, it was partly to do penance for having considered the city characterless and ugly, without understanding what had made it so. I also wanted to join two parts of a story I’d begun to learn in Dresden.

I knew I would find the ocher stone shell of St. Michael’s Cathedral, which was built as the parish church for a Benedictine community in the 14th century. But I never expected to be so moved by the new cathedral, which underscores the meaning of the World War II ruins adjacent to it.

I stayed the night before at Coombe Abbey (in a double for about $250, with breakfast), a handsome edifice dating back to the 12th century, with a moat, gardens and 500 acres of parkland, a few miles northeast of Coventry. The hotel stages Elizabethan banquets and has all the trappings of “merry olde England” -- marble busts, swagged drapes, canopy beds, tasseled pulls for flushing the toilets -- that are great fun but about as authentic as a silver-plated souvenir spoon.

A walk in the park to the morning music of birds put me more in tune with those things that seem to us intrinsically English.

I then went to the center of Coventry, marked by two soaring Gothic spires and restricted to pedestrian use, helping to quiet and sanctify the square at the heart of the cathedral precincts. Around it are the boxy contemporary buildings of Coventry’s university, a tourist office and St. Mary’s Guildhall, a medieval survivor of World War II, with a restaurant in the cellar.

There are several churches on the hilltop where Coventry was founded: Holy Trinity, founded in the early 12th century; the recently discovered foundations of the first cathedral, St. Mary’s, built by the Benedictines but pulled down when King Henry VIII dissolved the monasteries and created the Church of England; the Anglican St. Michael’s that replaced it, serving the diocese of Coventry until its destruction in 1940; and the St. Michael’s consecrated in 1962.

The modern cathedral, designed by British architect Basil Spence, is a rectangular red stone building with saw-toothed nave walls and a canopy connecting its porch to the ruins nearby. Its west side is lined by a window onto which artist John Hutton etched the figures of saints and angels. When the light is right, the translucent glass seems to disappear and the figures float, ghost-like, against the sky.

The eastern side of the cathedral, overlooking the altar, is covered by a huge tapestry of the risen Christ, his wounded palms raised in benediction.

Nearby is a gilded silver cross, into which sculptor Geoffrey Clarke set a treasured relic: a smaller cross made of three medieval nails, scavenged from the smoking ruins of the old cathedral.

Allied bombing obliterated churches all over Germany too, including Dresden’s lofty Frauenkirche. A painstaking reconstruction of that Baroque landmark is nearing completion, breathing new life into a city that is, in many ways, Coventry’s German cousin. Last year, the Frauenkirche was recrowned with a golden cross partly paid for by Coventry Cathedral and made by the son of an English airman who participated in the bombing of Dresden.

I sat for a while in the sanctuary at Coventry, trying to imagine a firestorm and thinking about how the two symbolically linked cities chose to reclaim their beloved houses of worship. In my head, I could hear Benjamin Britten’s “War Requiem,” commissioned for the cathedral’s consecration, and the question inescapably asked by such hallowed places: Which will prevail -- renewal and reconciliation, or man’s will to waste and war?

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To hear a sampling of Britten’s “War Requiem,” visit latimes.com/requiem. Susan Spano also writes “Postcards From Paris,” which can be read at www.latimes.com/susanspano.