How am I only starting the third post of this trip the night before I’m flying home?! I just haven’t been able to get myself organized enough to bang these posts out like I usually do, but hopefully I’ll knock one more out before I’m home. 🤞

Spoiler alert/update – I didn’t finish before getting home. Oh well!

Although I’ve been back in London for a couple of days, as you may recall, I actually left you hanging in Coventry. This side trip is actually what drove the timing of this whole UK trip, so it’s only fair that I cover it thoroughly, right? The city is northwest of London (only about an hour by train) and is the current home of the Pandorica Doctor Who convention, put together by Fantom Events. Neither of us had attended one of their events before, but we knew we’d have some friends here, both as attendees and as guests, and since the city was also new-to-us, we figured it would be worth the side trip! But of course, we had to see what else we could see and do while visiting and we quickly identified a few things:

• Coventry Cathedral and its tower.
  • As an added bonus, we realized when we got there that they also have a Blitz Museum.
• Sunday lunch at Golden Cross.
• The aforementioned convention. 😂

I realize that doesn’t sound like much, but since we knew it would be a pretty quick trip (arriving Friday late afternoon and leaving early afternoon on Sunday), time was running a bit against us. Coventry is a decent-sized city (~350k people), so I’m sure there’s plenty of other stuff to do, so do still look it up as a possible option on your next UK trip. Having been to London so much, I feel like I’ve done all most obvious day trips, but since I’d never done this one, I’m happy to have crossed it off the list.

Okay! So first up is the cathedral, which has an interesting history. There have actually been three cathedrals in Coventry – one that lasted until 1539 (only a few ruins remain, which we didn’t actually look for, though I’m sure we must have walked by them), a second that dates back to the 1300s (but didn’t actually get cathedral designation until 1918 and was then destroyed in WW2), and the third (current) one, which was built after the second was destroyed, officially gaining cathedral status in 1962. I always love visiting ruins (dating back to my very first UK trip in 2003, some of which I got to relive when I returned to the ruins of Glastonbury Abbey in 2022), so I was excited to check out these ruins, especially since visitors can walk through and right up to these particular ruins. There’s something really wild about walking through the shell of a building as I always find myself wondering what it was like before it was ruined. I snapped plenty of photos (as you can see below) and really enjoyed this part of our Saturday. Definitely don’t miss it when you’re in Coventry!

Speaking of entrances, here are a couple shots of our initial view of the ruins as we walked in. More on that tower in the left photo shortly!

A couple of memorials in the ruins.

A couple of wider shots – the left looking towards the altar from the side and the right looking towards the tower from the altar.

A couple of interesting views from chapels along the side of what was the main church, plus an informational plaque.

As we explored the ruins, we were pleasantly surprised to find the Blitz Museum tucked away at the back, housed in what must have been some kind of undercroft under the altar. Although I knew England (and London) was bombed heavily during WW2, I didn’t realize Coventry had been such a target, but it was bombed multiple times, with the worst being the night of 14/15 November 1940. In that one night, over 4,300 homes were destroyed, along with the cathedral and many other buildings.

The Blitz Museum opened in the early 2000s as a way to help people what it was like to live in Coventry during this era. It’s a fairly small space, but features mockups of a typical school home and house, all explained by very helpful volunteers. Although it’s a sobering subject, the museum is well-done and doesn’t take more than 20-30 minutes to fully experience. And as an added bonus, it’s FREE to visit (as the cathedral ruins also are). Although it’s not open every day, do look for it if you’re visiting the cathedral ruins.

Additional home spaces from our 1940s home.

Can you imagine having to wear gas masks or taking cover in bomb shelters? That was part of life in this era!

I’m really glad the museum was open! From there though, I was excited to get the chance to climb to the top of the cathedral’s tower, which somehow survived, despite the bombings (well, as excited as anyone can be to walk up 180 steps). Happily, the clouds had largely burned away by this point, so the sun was shining, giving us excellent views across Coventry once we reached the top. We were extra lucky because the day we were there was apparently the last day of the year the tower would be open for climbing! Since we hadn’t seen many people around the ruins, I assumed there wouldn’t be many people in the tower, which was both correct and fortuitous because, as you’ll see below, the staircase is pretty tight, so it would have been difficult to navigate people going up and down at the same time.

Although both the ruins and the museum are free, there’s a £5 charge to climb the tower, which seems more than reasonable to me. You just have to stop into the small shop at the base of the tower, where a helpful volunteer (or maybe it’s a paid position – I didn’t ask!) will happily take your payment, hand you a token to keep with you until you return it when you come back down (our guess is that they use them to track how many people climb the tower each day), and then point you to the tower entrance. There is a small resting point about halfway up the stairs, where you get a bit of a view of the tower bells, but aside from that, you just keep walking until you hit the top. Although 180 stairs seems light in comparison to the 366 stairs I climbed to get to the top of Belfort in Bruges or the 450 stairs to the top of the Duomo in Florence, it’s still a LOT of stairs to climb, so don’t underestimate it! Thankfully, since no other visitors were there when we were, we could take our time going both up and down.

Although Coventry isn’t the MOST scenic city I’ve gotten a birds-eye view of, it was really cool to see the ruins from above, plus some of the other sites around the area. It would have been less interesting had the sun stayed hidden, so I’m very glad it showed its shining self for us.

Ready to head into the tower!

As old spiral staircases go, it could be worse!

Although we didn’t feel TOO ruined after our time at the ruins (see what I did there?), but since we had a 15ish-minute walk to the convention venue, we opted to stop for a drink at The Town Crier on our way there. It’s a fun name for a pub, isn’t it?? And the prices were notably lower in Coventry as compared to London, so that was a nice bonus.

Finally, it was time to nerd out a bit! Unlike pretty much every other convention either of us have ever been to, this one wasn’t in a hotel, but rather at the Albany Theatre. Given that it’s a theatre space rather than a hotel with lots of meeting space, I wondered how it would work for the various parts of a convention (autographs, dealers room, panel space, etc), but I quickly found that it actually worked fine. Of course, this was a much smaller convention than the ones I normally go to, so not as much space was needed, but everything had dedicated space and there was even a small bar, too! So all the bases were covered. 😁

Neither of us were interested in getting autographs or photos, but we enjoyed some panels and running into some friends over the couple of days we were there (really mostly Saturday as we had lunch plans Sunday afternoon and then a train back to London to catch after that). So the photos below are from both days, but mostly Saturday.

Did I mention it was Halloween on Saturday?? What a great cosplay!

I had a fun time with this dalek. 😂

We had a nice time hear from guests like Rob Shearman, Katy Manning, and Michael Troughton over the weekend.

The Saturday evening programming included some fun games with a few of the guests.

They had to answer questions, read lines, and play Charades. It was a fun time!

In addition to the convention programming on Saturday, Felicity and I also had a very tasty dinner out at Pickles (a bit of a surprising name for an Indian restaurant, isn’t it??). We didn’t set out looking for an Indian meal, but we left the theatre and walked in a different direction than we’d been walking to get to/from our hotel and Pickles was pretty much the only restaurant we walked by, so we went for it! I’m glad we did though because everything was SO tasty! And we could immediately tell we were out of the “big city” of London because the prices were way more sensible, especially given how much good food we got. We couldn’t finish it all!

The onion baji, samosas, and naan were all delish! We went with fried rice to go with our entrees instead of white rice and it was really good!

Rather than make this already-long post annnnny longer, I’ll wrap it up! I’m already home from this trip now anyway (and therefore have also left Coventry 😉), but check back soon for the next post that wraps up our time in Coventry and gets us back to London-town!