Coventry Blitz - Background

Background

At the start of the Second World War, Coventry was an industrial city of about 238,000 people which, like much of the industrial West Midlands, contained metal-working industries. In Coventry's case, these included cars, bicycles, aeroplane engines and, since 1900, munitions factories. In the words of the historian Frederick Taylor, "Coventry ... was therefore, in terms of what little law existed on the subject, a legitimate target for aerial bombing".

During the First World War, thanks to the advanced state of the machine tooling industry in the city that quickly could be turned to war purposes and industries such as the Coventry Ordnance Works it had assumed the role of one of the leading munition centres in the UK, for example manufacturing 25 percent of all British aircraft produced during the war.

Like many of the industrial towns of the English West Midlands that had been industrialised during the Industrial Revolution, and many of the small and medium-sized factories were woven into the same streets as the workers' houses and the shops of the city centre. However, it already had many large interwar suburbs of private and council housing, which were relatively isolated from industrial buildings.