Guest post by Stella Backhouse, a writer based in Coventry. This post was originally published in issue #6 of Action Rayz zine, curated by Jazz Moreton & Alan Van Wijgerden. Details of Action Rayz’ regular film club screenings can be found here.

After the very public collapse of City of Culture Trust and the promised ‘legacy’ of Coventry’s year as UK City of Culture well and truly on the scrapheap, where does the city’s arts scene go from here?

In the run-up to City of Culture, I used to write a website called Food Covolution. It was an accessible, fast-paced site whose focus was food and drink in Coventry and nothing else. Every week it published features, opinion, reviews, food event listings and a lite-bites news round-up. I was writing at a time when food had never been hotter: street food was the new frontier, food festivals were rivalling rock festivals, and for fanatical foodies, gorging on Instagram food porn was a totally respectable way to while away a wet weekend. Except in Coventry. Somehow this economy-boosting gastronomic bonanza had passed our city by.

The reasons for this are complex, systemic and rooted in Coventry’s relatively poor economic position compared to nearby towns such as Leamington. I knew one website alone could never solve all that. But my hunch was that in order to sustain food culture, you first have to describe it. Once you’ve convinced people it’s really a thing, their relationship with it changes. They start to see it as something to be proud of – to be used, protected and discussed. I like to think that with Food Covolution, I at least showed the possibilities of this approach. But I also think it’s an approach that can be applied to other cultures, including the arts: for the local population to develop a relationship with their local arts scene, they first need to have it conceptualised and made visible to them.

Ask Coventrians about City of Culture, and many of them will still cite, as crowning evidence of its true colours, the CoC events guide that didn’t hit the city’s doormats until almost all the events it promoted had already happened. For many people, this revealing blunder summed up what they perceived as City of Culture’s contempt for actual locals. But the truth is that lack of a reliable one-stop arts-and-events guide has hampered Coventry for years. The demise of a meaningful local press has created a vacuum that others have sought to fill, but success has only ever been patchy.

In recent years we’ve had Native Coventry, an impressively hi-spec and glossy product unfortunately marred by unprofessional online behaviour. Secret Knock Zine offered a more serious-minded exploration of the local arts scene, but though the printed mag was a small object of desire in its own right, lack of a rolling website made it too inflexible to meet modern demands. My own website folded through a combination of Covid and ‘official’ displeasure at my honest assessment of Coventry’s food landscape (which is a story in itself).

Currently, the Coventry Rocks website provides a decent-enough calendar of mainstream and events and places to visit, with particular emphasis on family-friendly, but little else. The Sitting Rooms of Culture Facebook page offers joyful celebration of alternative arts as well as valuable space for discussion/debate, but like all Facebook pages, is haphazard and unsearchable. Other online resources such as Visit Coventry and City Council pages are useful but far from exhaustive.

What Coventry needs, in the aftermath of City of Culture, is a resource where alongside mainstream events, its own home-grown culture can be made visible to it. An independent local arts website (supported or not by print) would include listings for grassroots venues such as the iconic LTB Showrooms; it could showcase local artists, writers and performers and give them a place to talk about their work, maybe about how the city inspires them. Obviously this is a dream; in reality it requires time, money, vision and commitment. But neighbouring cities manage it: Birmingham has Grapevine; Leicester has Cool as Leicester. Why shouldn’t Coventry have something too?

Time alone will give the verdict on City of Culture’s lasting impacts on Coventry’s arts scene. But with the bandwagon now rolling onwards to Bradford, leaving our city filed quietly away under ‘been there, done that’, it’s up to us to re-discover ourselves. A good, busy arts website could be one way of speeding up the process.