In 1938, Coventry hired its first ever city architect. Donald Gibson was 29. He arrived with big ideas about how a city centre should work, and by May 1940 he was showing the public plans for a new one.

Six months later, the Blitz flattened most of the old centre. The plans stopped being a proposal and became a necessity.

The rebuild started with a stone. In June 1946, the Mayor laid a slab of green Westmorland slate near Broadgate, carved with a phoenix rising from the flames, carrying the new plans in its beak. It wasn’t only a symbol. Surveyors set their instruments on it and took every level of the new precinct from that one point. The whole thing was built up around it, and underneath it there’s a time capsule holding the plans and the city’s record of the war.

Two years later, Princess Elizabeth came to open the new Broadgate and lay the foundation stone of the precinct. It was the first planned shopping precinct in the country: no cars, shops on two levels, walkways along the top, and the view lined up on the spire of St Michael’s.

Not all of it worked. The upper-floor shops never really took off. But it was built in its own time, for the people who’d just lived through the war, not as a copy of what had been lost. A plaque in the Upper Precinct quotes Gibson’s view that a town must live.

Gibson left in the mid-fifties, and Arthur Ling finished the job: the Lower Precinct, the round market and the neon panels celebrating the city’s industries.