Coventry University Archives: News

Material donated to the archives in 2023

Highlights in 2023 included three visually interesting donations of designs and drawings from the Arts & Society College (formerly the Arts & Humanities Faculty). 

Some favourites from these were produced by students on the Automotive & Transport Design course. These show cars suitable for 007 James Bond that have the sorts of extras any secret agent would appreciate in their vehicle – such as emergency ejector seat and parachute, a drinks console holding champagne to toast a successful mission, and an off road version that has fog lights and mud guards plus added rocket launcher for those more challenging moments in difficult terrain.

A gentler car with less weaponry was the micro car which was a very mini cab designed for use in urban areas.

Other items include 1979 drawings for Kiddicraft upside down plastic bath toys which some readers may remember from their childhood or child-rearing days. The designs were by David Raffo & John Pape, who were part-time lecturers at the university in the late 1970s and early 1980s. 

Posters for various events are also in the donations. Examples include one promoting 1967 enrolment days for Coventry College of Art part-time courses and one for a 1985 sculpture exhibition of Coventry Lanchester Polytechnic student work at Whitefriars.

Further examples of material received from the Arts & Society College include files, papers and sessional exam results for Coventry Municipal Art School, Coventry School of Art, and Coventry College of Art (1935-1955), plus results lists (1965-1978).

Visual items included posters produced by staff or students to promote exhibitions, shows, events, concerts, university courses, degree shows and other occasions. These included a poster for an exhibition of recent drawings by Coventry artist George Wagstaffe held in the exhibition hall of Lanchester Polytechnic in November 1978. 

There are also posters for two Freedom From Hunger concerts by the Band of the Coldstream Guards held in the ruins of the old cathedral on 24 June 1963; and promoting Coventry Lanchester Polytechnic’s BA Hons Fine Arts course.

Some material came from the university’s Records Management team such as mid-1980s booklets for Coventry Lanchester Polytechnic's student hall of residence Caradoc Hall in Henley Green, Coventry. The booklet explained how the hall was originally built by Coventry City Council as single person dwellings in 1969 and then leased to the polytechnic in the 1980s and converted into a hall of residence containing 63 bedsitters and 62 single bedroom flatlets for 187 students, plus two resident members of staff and the 17-storey building’s superintendent.

The cost for the four-month conversion was £180,000 (about £680,000 at today’s prices) and it was estimated that it would cost about £144,000 a year to run and manage the hall (about £550,000 today). 

The booklet went on to explain that although the building was four miles away from the city centre there were good bus routes, and shops available half a mile away in the Bell Green shopping centre. More conveniently a pub, a newsagents, a general provisions shop and a dentists’s surgery were close to the hall. 

The nearby historic building of the former Manor Farm house was also mentioned. 

The last donation of the year was a handout for Lanchester College of Technology open days in May 1966 which included a short history of the college, its current buildings and details on the demonstrations available. College buildings shown on a plan included Block A (Charles Ward), Block B (George Eliot), Block C (the first Frank Whittle building demolished in 2009 to make way for the Student Hub), Block D (the James Starley building demolished and replaced by landscaping and gardening for the 2021 City of Culture), Block E (Priory building), and Block F (the Alan Berry building demolished in 2022 and replaced by landscaping).

The college library also got a mention (then in Alan Berry) serving the Lanchester College and the College of Art. The stock at the time was 21,000 volumes with 800 periodicals received regularly. There were seats for 200 people, who could make use of the reading room and six private study rooms. Equipment included microfilm readers – a format which is still used today for preservation purposes.

During the year members of the library staff continued to give their time to help with essential work, for example working their way through thousands of marketing and estates photographs to re-house them in archive friendly polyester sleeves and proper archival quality ring-binder boxes. They did the same for a much larger number of slides used by former lecturer Anthony Hobson during his history of art lectures at Lanchester Polytechnic.

Other staff have helped box listing uncatalogued items so we have a much better idea of what is held in the collections. This has included photographs and postcards in material created by a former member of staff who collected items relating to Coventry-born actress Ellen Terry. The aim is to get these images digitized as they may be useful for any plans in 2028 to commemorate 100 years since Ellen Terry's death. 

Also being looked at by staff is material created by the university and its predecessors, which needs identifying and sorting to create a structure to enable cataloguing to archival standards.