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Send yourself to Coventry, Britain's underrated Capital of Culture, in 2021 Can the original Ghost Town, bombed into oblivion and left on the post-industrial scrap heap, pull off a City of Culture year? The ruins of the old cathedral Credit: Getty “Nothing, like something, happens anywhere,” wrote Philip Larkin, in ‘I Remember, I Remember’, one of the few poems he penned about Coventry, his birthplace. The poet’s memories of a humdrum upbringing probably chime with many people’s preconceptions about Coventry. It’s not only that the city is in the Midlands – that inter-zone bet...

(September Publishing, £16.99) SIMON PHIPPS’S Brutal North is a stupendous photographic record of the so-called brutalist architecture of northern England. In it, his instinct for composition and employment of sharp viewing angles captures the spirit of some exquisite buildings. Deliberately shot on mainly cloudy days and in dissipated light, Phipps achieves a clarity of detail that would be buried by contrast on a sunny day. The term brutalist is derived from a lazy translation of the French “beton brut,” which simply means “raw concrete.” It describes surfaces of buildings left u...