Canley

A Memory of Coventry.

The part of Canley where we lived was made up of what were called "the steel houses" and "the prefabs". Charter Avenue was a dual carriageway and then, at the beginning of Ten Shilling Woods it became a single road. I was always told that it had been begun during the War and was built by Italian POW's; when the war ended they went home and the road was never completed. The house we lived in was built by Wimpey. The woods were our playground - Ten Shilling Woods (now has a pub 'The Half Sovereign' opposite it - and Park Woods - partly deciduous and partly conifer. The conifer part was known by children as the Dark Woods because the canopy kept out the sun.
Before the nursery was built, at the end of Founder Close and Papenham Green, it was mainly fields and old war worker hostels that had been taken over by squatters who had been bombed out and displaced. Whole families lived in quite squalid conditions. The primary school - Charter Primary (whose name was officially Charter Temporary School - waiting for Alderman Harris School to be built) was at the end of Preston Close and, again, most of the buildings were old war worker buildings. Following Wolfe Road from Charter Ave you came to the LMS railway line and the very narrow bridge under the line. This bridge was, originally, the entrance to a large hall that was moved, in the 1860's (I think) to beyond Torrington Ave. The house had its own grounds but was occupied by poor families. We would go to the orchard, there, and scrump apples.
The children had their own local gangs:-
"We're the Canley Kids,
We fight with dustbin lids,
We spend our tanners
On rusty spanners.
We're the Canley Kids"
We fought pitched battles, occasionally, with The Hostel Kids (who squatted in the old worker hostels). I've often wondered if Torrington Ave was named after one of the Earls of Torrington and if the big old house was, originally, a family seat.