Robert de Beaumont granted his manor to the French nuns in the mid-twelfth century, and a Benedictine priory rose up beside the River Anker. By 1272 the town was being recorded as Nunne Eton in the official rolls. A market charter from Henry II followed around 1160, reconfirmed in 1226, and the settlement became a magnet for the surrounding villages - the place farmers brought their grain and bought their salt. The nunnery itself did not survive Henry VIII's dissolution in 1539 and fell into ruin, but parts of the abbey church were rebuilt in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, leaving the town with a fragment of medieval stone still standing among the modern shopfronts. The Wars of the Roses ended just five miles to the north-west at Bosworth Field in 1485, and although the battle itself fell on the Leicestershire side of the border, the news must have reached Nuneaton within hours.

By the seventeenth century, silk ribbon weaving had taken hold across north Warwickshire, brought to a new level by Huguenot refugees fleeing France. Nuneaton's weavers worked from distinctive top-shops: two floors of family living below, a long workshop above with windows running the entire length of the wall to catch the daylight needed for fine work. They fiercely refused to move into factories, valuing the independence of their cottage trade, and as late as 1851 nearly half the town worked in ribbons. Then the Cobden-Chevalier Treaty of 1860 dropped the duties on French silk, cheap imports flooded in, and the trade collapsed within a generation. Underneath the looms lay another fortune: coal. Warwickshire's coalfield produced 545,000 tons in 1860 and over five million tons by 1913. In 1911, one in three working men in Nuneaton went down a pit. The last local mine closed in 1968, the last Warwickshire colliery at Daw Mill in 2013, and the town has been finding new work ever since.

On a farm just outside town, on the Arbury Estate, Mary Anne Evans was born in 1819. She would publish her novels under a man's name - George Eliot - because Victorian England would not take a woman novelist seriously, and she had no intention of being dismissed. Her early masterpiece Scenes of Clerical Life, published in 1858, drew its characters and streets directly from the Nuneaton of her childhood. Milby is Nuneaton; Shepperton is Chilvers Coton; Knebley is Astley; Dorlcote Mill is her family home at Griff House, now a hotel and restaurant on the A444. The town named its hospital after her, set a statue of her in Newdegate Square, and built a permanent display about her life in the museum at Riversley Park. She remains one of the very few towns in England able to claim a Victorian novelist of the first rank as a hometown daughter.

On 17 May 1941, the Luftwaffe came in force. Nuneaton was a railway and engineering town, useful to the war effort and therefore worth attacking, and the heaviest raid of the war killed 100 people in a single night, destroyed 380 houses, and damaged more than 10,000. By the time the bombing ended, 131 residents of Nuneaton had died from the air war. After 1945 the architect Frederick Gibberd was brought in to rebuild the gutted town centre, and what followed is recognisably the work of postwar planning: a ringroad, an indoor shopping centre, new municipal buildings. Around 2,500 council houses went up in the 1950s, with the largest estate at Camp Hill providing 1,400 homes by 1956. The town grew outward through Weddington, St Nicolas Park, Whitestone, Stockingford, and the population kept climbing until it became, by some measures, the most successful piece of postwar municipal expansion in the region.

If George Eliot is Nuneaton's most famous resident, the Dandelion Fountain may be its most photographed object. Officially called the Roanne Fountain, it sits on a roundabout in the middle of town, built in 2000, with 385 individual spraying arms throwing fifty thousand gallons of water per hour into the Warwickshire sky. In 2016 the Roundabout Appreciation Society named it UK Roundabout of the Year - a title the town wears with absolute sincerity. Nearby stand other survivors of the postwar boom and bust: the Grade-II listed Ritz Cinema in glorious Art Deco style, the volunteer-run Abbey Theatre with seats for 250, the Bosworth Battlefield Heritage Centre a short drive north, and the heritage Battlefield Line Railway running steam trains across the Leicestershire border. Nuneaton today is a commuter town for Coventry and Birmingham, but it remains stubbornly itself - a place that survived the nuns, the looms, the pits, the bombs, and the planners, and is still here, weaving on.