The “King’s Head,” as already hinted, has been rebuilt in the stained glass and glitter style, and is quite uninteresting, save for the effigy of “Peeping Tom,” moved from the frontage of a neighbouring old house, peering curiously from an upper storey.
Crossing the intersection of Hertford Street and Broad Gate at this point, the Holyhead Road leads out of Coventry by way of Smithford Street and Fleet Street. Before the revolutionary time of Telford, it continued through Spon End and Spon Gate and reached Allesley along the winding route now known as the “Old Allesley Road,” passing two toll-gates on the way. The “new” road branches off to the right immediately after passing St. John’s church and, passing a long factory-like row of old weavers’ houses, and climbing uphill at first, goes afterwards flat and straight to Allesley, in two miles. “Windmill Hill,” as it was called, was not a very exalted height, but from it in the old days a quite panoramic view of Coventry was obtainable. It is the view, now blotted out by intervening houses, seen in Turner’s noble picture of the city. In it you see the hollow road, with St. John’s tower at the bottom, and coaches toiling up, on the way to Birmingham; in the distance the neighbouring spires of Trinity and St. Michael’s, with Christ Church aloof, on the right. Turner took his stand on the hill-crest, where Meriden Street branches off to the right; but where the grassy banks then sloped steeply to the road, and the sheep roamed free, suburban villas now cover the hillside, the retaining walls of their gardens masking the rugged old earth-banks.
[Illustration: COVENTRY, FROM WINDMILL HILL. _After J. M. W. Turner, R.A._]
A red-brick toll-gate marks the junction of old and new roads at the entrance of Allesley, a pretty roadside village on a hillside. There were at one time two very large and busy coaching inns here, the “Windmill” and the “White Lion,” and here they stand even now; not as inns, it is true, but structurally unaltered. Very handsome red-brick buildings they are, belonging to the Georgian and Queen Anne periods: the “White Lion,” once famed for its cheesecakes and home-brewed ale, prominent as the largest building in the village street, and now divided into two houses; the “Windmill” half a mile away, standing back in a meadow and used as a farmhouse.