Re: Lady Godiva Olympics 2012
Godiva is back, and she’s big – but she needs to be. When the first Lady Godiva rode through the streets of Coventry 1,000-odd years ago, she just had to get a tax break for the people from her grasping husband. This reincarnation carries on her six-metre-high shoulders the hope of reviving the engineering and manufacturing of the Midlands, once renowned across the world.
“Seven years ago, the moment we heard London had got the Olympics, we thought right, what can we do?” said Roger Medwell, ex-chairman of NP Aerospace in Coventry. “The first thought was let’s make an enormous statue, 70ft [21 metres] tall like that thing in the north [Antony Gormley’s Angel of the North, in Gateshead] – but let’s make it move, because that’s what we do in the Midlands, we make things move.”
There were tears in the eyes of many of the team on Saturday night when the giant marionette stood up, not quite 70ft tall but still an amazing sight, towering above the crowd, and weighing five tonnes. She smiled, stretched out her arms, and blinked her great blue eyes in apparent amazement at the cheering people, a choir of 150, hundreds of dancers, and aerial artists and fireworks showering from the cathedral – itself a symbol of resurrection, risen from the rubble after the ancient church and most of the medieval heart of Coventry were destroyed in one night’s firestorm during the second world war.
This time Godiva has cost taxpayers quite a lot – Arts Council England gave £500,000 as part of the Cultural Olympiad, and the council another £450,000 for the opening celebration. She was devised by Coventry carnival company Imagineer and special-effects company Artem, but most of the money – about** £2m** – and the muscle has come in cash, materials, inspiration, time, and metal-bashing sweat from Coventry University’s engineering department, and manufacturers, artists and craftspeople across the region.
In the last week the head of the fork lift trucks unit at NP Aerospace waded in to help with a last-minute problem with the rig – a steam punk confection of new or cannibalised machine parts including the fork lift, bits of a vintage lorry and an old school desk – that drives the puppet. A team from the handbuilt bicycle firm Pashley turned up to check over the Cyclopaedia, a squadron of linked bicycles that will tow Godiva when she takes to the open road, with the muscle power supplied by 100 volunteers led by the British cycling champion Mick Ives, and Dave Batstone and Justin Tipple, a design engineer at NP Aerospace and a sheet metal worker at Shaw’s.
After a weekend out and about in Coventry, where she acquired a steel corset designed by Zandra Rhodes and a flowing golden silk coat embroidered with symbols of the region and, patched into the lining, the names of all the people who have worked on the project, she leaves the city.
Mmillions more will see her as the Cyclopaedia draws her down the A5 towards London, with more events at overnight stops at Rugby, Northampton, Luton, Hatfield, and Waltham Abbey.
Coventry has no intention of letting it all end with the Olympics. A permanent home is being created for her in the city: “Every year she’ll wake up, and every year she’ll need a carnival to welcome her,” Jane Hytch of Imagineer promised.
On Saturday night almost 3,000 people crammed into the cathedral square for the awakening ceremony, and many more applied for but couldn’t get tickets. Her first civic duty was to head out into the streets among the late-night revellers. A man blearily recalled one aspect of the legend as the hem of her gossamer gown wafted past. “She’s got clothes on,” he grumbled.
