As ruins go, the old cathedral of St Michael, Coventry is towering. The 295ft spire is the tallest among medieval English cathedrals after Salisbury and Norwich. St Michael’s was not even built as a cathedral, which it became in 1918, but as a parish church.
It is hard to see the ruins today without sadness at its destruction by bombing 75 years ago, on November 14 1940. But the steeple had been near to toppling 80 years earlier. “Its exterior is, in fact, a mere wreck,” reported the architect George Gilbert Scott in 1869, “the dust of disintegration falling in heaps about its base, and masses of stone from time to time falling down, making increased destruction of the parts which they strike in their passage.”
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