Coventry's pre-modern fame turns on a story that may or may not be true. In the 11th century, the wife of Leofric, Earl of Mercia rode through the streets naked to win her husband's agreement to reduce the heavy taxation he had imposed on his tenants. Lady Godiva probably existed; the ride is harder to verify. By the same legend, every townsperson stayed indoors with shutters closed except for a tailor named Tom, who peeped, and so gave English the phrase Peeping Tom. By the Middle Ages the city had grown rich on cloth, particularly the dye called Coventry blue from which the expression 'true blue' is said to derive. Three spires came to define the skyline, those of St Michael's Cathedral, Holy Trinity Church, and the bell tower of Christ Church, the only fragment left of the Greyfriars monastery dissolved by Henry VIII. The first two still stand today; the third was lost when Christ Church was bombed in 1940 and its tower demolished in 1950.

The late nineteenth century turned Coventry from a textile town into the cradle of British vehicle manufacture. Bicycle makers like Rover and Humber set up here in the 1880s, and as the bicycle gave way to the motor car, the same firms reorganised around the new technology. By 1910 the city was producing Daimler, Singer, Triumph, Lea-Francis and Standard motor cars and Coventry Climax engines. After the First World War, aircraft engines joined them. This industrial intensity, the lattice of factories making things Britain's army and air force needed, was exactly what made the city a Luftwaffe target in the next war. Today Jaguar Land Rover still has design offices in the city, the London Electric Vehicle Company builds the famous black cab here in nearby Ansty, and Coventry University runs one of the country's larger automotive engineering programmes. The cars defined the city, and the city's history of building them has not quite finished.

From 1940 to 1942 the Coventry Blitz pulverised the medieval core. The single night of 14 to 15 November 1940 did the largest damage, killing more than 500 people and gutting the cathedral. When the time came to decide what to do, the city chose unusually. Rather than demolishing the cathedral ruin or rebuilding it as it had been, Coventry kept the burnt-out walls open to the sky as a memorial and commissioned Basil Spence to design a new cathedral immediately adjacent. Consecrated in 1962, Spence's new Cathedral of St Michael stands at a right angle to the old, its zig-zag walls of pink Hollington sandstone and tall stained glass facing the surviving spire. Inside, the Graham Sutherland tapestry of Christ in Glory dominates the east wall. Benjamin Britten composed his War Requiem for the consecration, scored to interleave English and German texts. The choice has shaped Coventry's identity ever since: a city that does not bury its dead under new construction.

What the bombs did not finish, the post-war planners did. City Architect Donald Gibson had drafted radical reconstruction plans even before the bombing, and after 1945 his ideas were carried through into a city centre of pedestrian precincts ringed by an elevated motorway, the notorious Coventry Ring Road, whose nine junctions and single on-off ramps still defeat first-time drivers. Much of the medieval fabric that the bombs spared was demolished anyway in the name of progress. Some of what replaced it, including the Lower Precinct and the brutalist Three Spires Shopping Centre, has aged into a period style of its own. Spon Street, on the western edge of the centre, became a refuge for surviving timber-framed buildings rescued and re-erected from elsewhere in the city. Today the city centre is being remade again, more cautiously: pedestrianised more thoroughly, with the Phoenix Initiative completed in 2004 (shortlisted for the Stirling Prize) and the public realm around the cathedral redesigned for a city that, in 2021, became UK City of Culture.

Modern Coventry has a population of just over 365,000, eleventh-largest in the country, and two universities. The University of Warwick, southwest of the city, became one of the country's most prominent research institutions within a generation of its 1965 founding. Coventry University, smaller and centred in the city itself, has expanded into the medieval streets the bombs missed. The Herbert Art Gallery and Museum holds the city's John Collier painting of Lady Godiva alongside the medieval guild artefacts that survived the fire. The Transport Museum on Hales Street holds the world's largest publicly accessible collection of British cars, including Thrust SSC, the jet-powered vehicle that broke the sound barrier on land in 1997. Out at Baginton, the reconstructed Lunt Roman Fort sits on the foundations of a first-century Roman cavalry post. The medieval cloth city is gone. The Roman one and the motor one are still recoverable, if you know where to look.