The Hillfields History Group collection includes photographs taken during an era of interest to the Imagine Research Project: the early 1970s, when the Home Office funded the Community Development Project, the first regeneration project in the UK to research and understand the problems of Hillfields in conjunction with the residents.
The collection also includes images of the buildings demolished by clearance and redevelopment. Their collection is a vital resource to understanding top shops in Hillfields and its past as a live/work part of Coventry.
Urban Coffee also showed the plans and redevelopment of Hillfields through images taken from the Coventry City Council archive. These images, many not seen before, show just how ambitious in their vision the council was during the post-war period.
The visions, however, did not match reality, as development was slow and local families opposed the move from a work/live area to one dominated by residential development. Even the popular shopping route along Primrose Hill Street was to be demolished to encourage shoppers to the new city centre.
By 1969, government policy had changed from clearance to general improvement: streets earmarked for demolition, such as Colchester and Winchester Street, were remodelled into a carless format which still remains today.