: 151–152 The most notable damage was to the new Rex Cinema which had been opened in February 1937 and had already been closed by an earlier bombing raid in September. Together, the raids killed 176 people and injured around 680. There were 17 small raids on Coventry by the Luftwaffe during the Battle of Britain between August and October 1940 during which around 198 tons of bombs fell.
The city was also at the centre of Britain's car industry, with many carmakers being based at different locations in Coventry, although many of these factories had switched to help supply the war effort. However, it developed many large interwar suburbs of both private and council housing, which were relatively isolated from industrial buildings. Like many of the industrial towns of the English West Midlands region that had been industrialised during the Industrial Revolution, many of the small- and medium-sized factories in the city were woven into the same streets as the workers' houses and the shops of the city centre. ĭuring the First World War, the advanced state of the mechanical tooling industry in the city meant that pre-war production could quickly be turned to war production purposes, with industries such as the Coventry Ordnance Works assuming the role of one of the leading munition centres in the UK, manufacturing 25% of all British aircraft produced during the war. 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".
In Coventry's case, these included cars, bicycles, aeroplane engines and, since 1900, munitions factories. See also: History of Coventry Broadgate, Coventry in 1917Īt the start of the Second World War, Coventry was an industrial city of around 238,000 people which, like much of the industrial West Midlands, contained metal and wood-working industries.
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