We arrived at Hawkesbury Junction in time for a Sunday afternoon drink at the Greyhound Pub, it really was too cold to sit outside and fortunately the staff didn’t have a problem with Duggie taking his place under one of the tables inside. Although we have passed it several times this was our first visit and we found it full of character and characters, we will stop here again.
Well in fact nobody sent us, it was our decision to revisit Coventry, We weren’t overly impressed last time except by a quick visit to the excellent Museum of British Road Transport, but at least it wasn’t pouring with rain when we arrived as it was last time. On the way we passed many sculptures, including the concrete sofa and the large wooden bollard and rope.
Most of the old factories have been cleared away, but an exception is the elegant row of Cash’s Hundred Houses, in fact slightly less than half this number was built and only 37 remain. The ground and first floor were designed as homes for the workers and the powered looms for making the famous name tapes were on the top floor, now all of the floors are lived in. The original electricity power station that provided the energy for all the cycles, motorcycles and car manufacturers that were based in Coventry still stands and has also been converted into homes, but with less elegance.
This time Jacquie accompanied me to the Transport museum and enjoyed it as much as I did. It is amazing to see just how many car manufactures were bas here and the enormous boom between 1950 and 1970, but by 1980 only four makes of car were still produced and now there are none.
The town centre is depressing; the 1950’s rebuild to my mind hasn’t stood the test of time, but surprisingly around the new Cathedral some of the old houses were painstaking rebuilt after the war. We didn’t go into the Cathedral as we intend to return here next week with some chums and wanted to save it for then.
On Tuesday we left the attractive Coventry Basin under the little bridge that in olden days was barred at night with no boat being allowed to stay in the basin, but we had had a very peaceful night. A couple of hours later we had retraced our way and had re-moored at Hawkesbury.
On the way we passed several traditional cast iron bridges carrying the towpathover arms leading off the canal, apparently these were built when the Northern Oxford canal was straightened in the 1820’s and the new cut bypassed the old loops, some of these arms now lead to small marinas. Eventually we reached our intended destination at Rugby and squeezed into a mooring close to the path that leads to the Tesco store, good result.
