It Takes a City has had a long fuse. It was first sparked over 15 years ago by a story I was told by Paul Duncombe, who was looking after the Belgrade Theatre on the night of the 12th of March 2008, when much of Coventry City Centre was evacuated, due to an unexploded 50kg WW2 German bomb, discovered by workers excavating the site behind the theatre that was to become Belgrade Plaza.

What Paul described to me of the events of that night I have wanted to recreate ever since, and ITAC is the result. The other thread in our narrative concerns the story of seven men of Royal Engineers 9th Bomb Disposal Company, which I discovered much more recently, after learning of the bomb disposal crews who were working in the city in response to nightly raids in the autumn of 1940, and whose lives are poignantly remembered by a memorial on Whitley common. (It’s on the corner near the Ibis Hotel, do search it out). Each story concerns a bomb, but it’s the people who take on the task of dealing with the aftermath of war, rather than the bombs themselves, that define those stories, wrapped as they are into the DNA of this city. A retired Bomb Disposal officer told us that he’d never met a selfish person working in a field in which,  for most of us, the daily risks are difficult to imagine facing. 

Derek Nisbet, Talking Birds, November 2025

https://www.coventrycathedral.org.uk/events/it-takes-a-city