This article was written by Diane Tolley who lives in Canley and is chair of the neighbourhood stakeholders group.

The WMG Outreach and SME teams, at the University of Warwick, were pleased to lend their support to the Herbert Art Gallery & Museum, for a unique project inspired by Coventry artist and campaigner, Daniel Lismore. The gallery hosted a series of masterclasses challenging local community groups to create their own mannequins using the techniques and skills adopted by Daniel in his recent exhibition ‘Be Yourself, Everyone Else is Taken.’

Three University of Warwick academics have been recognised in the 2021 Queen’s Birthday Honours List.

Are you a community performance group based in Coventry and Warwickshire and interested in showcasing your creativity during the City of Culture year? This is an opportunity for existing local amateur and community performance groups for youth or student performance, amateur theatre, dance groups, choirs and more!

From the 19th April - 30th June, the Full Day tariff between Monday - Friday for the University’s Pay By Mobile service will be at the reduced rate of £3.50. More information about car parking can be found on an ongoing basis on the Car Parking webpages.

Just before the Easter weekend, two conscientious groups of Warwick students joined forces with other members of the local community to volunteer for Coventry Foodbank, helping to pack 3,100 food parcels to ensure local vulnerable families don’t go hungry this Easter.

Trainee doctors at Warwick Medical School continue are putting their passion for patients to use during the pandemic as they assist with efforts to get the people of Coventry and Warwickshire vaccinated against Covid-19.

Newly unveiled artist's impressions of Warwick Art's Centre's development, plans to reopen and summer programme.

External link to City of Culture webpages: The City of Culture Trust are looking for 5,000 volunteers throughout the year, to spend as much or as little time as they can, to showcase our city. Take a look to see how you could be involved.

External link to Coventry Telegraph news article

The Coventry Very Light Rail (VLR) is an innovative light rail system which will be battery powered, lightweight and rail-based. In March 2019 a 3D simulation of the vehicle was released, and even with Covid-19 lockdowns, the vehicle build is progressing on schedule at NP Aerospace in Coventry.

A showcase of work by Coventry artists, funded by the city’s universities and produced during lockdown, will launch online on Monday 5 October.

Read about the project and how our academics are involved.

Lisa Randle, Chef de Partie in Warwick Conferences’ Rootes kitchen, has been putting her writing skills to good use by volunteering as a pen pal befriender through Hope Coventry’s Good Neighbours programme. She is writing letters to vulnerable local people in Coventry.

The latest round of awards for collaborative research projects contributing to Coventry City of Culture have just been announced. Now in their third year, these collaborative projects are jointly funded between Coventry University and the University of Warwick, and have been granted funding of up to £2,000 for projects to partner with a Coventry-based organisation to undertake locally impactful research that invites the general public to participate

Working with West Midlands Police, we delivered around 2,000 Valentine's Day cards to student properties with key crime prevention messages.

Autonomous pods born in Coventry are now able to swarm together in a world first, thanks to research by WMG at the University of Warwick in partnership with Aurrigo and Milton Keynes council.

With the concept of driverless pods now more realistic than futuristic, the vehicles are one step closer to being put to use, as they can now help each other to drive and navigate through pedestrian areas around people.

'Science on the Hill' is a new programme of public engagement events jointly hosted by the University’s School of Life Sciences and the Wellcome-Warwick Quantiative Biomedicine Programme at Warwick Medical School. These interactive two hour events taking place across the academic year will feature 20 researchers giving a birds-eye view of the latest exciting developments in their discipline.

Five free public events that will showcase the cutting-edge research being performed at the Gibbet Hill campus into the building blocks of life, futures in medicine and the factors that define our health are scheduled up to July 2020.

A very special graduation took place in December thanks to the partnership between the University of Warwick and national education charity, IntoUniversity.

The graduation ceremony, for Y6 pupils from Frederick Bird School in Coventry, marked the end of FOCUS week, a five-day programme designed to introduce the youngsters to university-style learning and give them a taste of what higher education is all about.

Martin Yardley, who currently combines the roles of Executive Director of Place at Coventry City Council and the CEO of the Coventry and Warwickshire Local Enterprise Partnership, is to join the University of Warwick in a senior business development role.

On the 28th November 2019, Steve Berry OBE, Head of Highways Maintenance, Innovation, Resilience, Light Rail and Cableways at the UK Department of Transport will give the keynote address at the Very Light Rail Conference being held at The Slate on the University of Warwick’s campus. He will speak about the potential for Very Light Rail to transform local public transport.

More than 500 people took part in the workshops, talks and activities organised by the University of Warwick for this year’s ESRC Festival of Social Science. University researchers took to Coventry and Warwickshire’s streets, bars and community centres to share insights from their work with enthusiastic and interested audiences. The events tackled topics from the nature of time itself and the puzzle of DNA to taxes and accents.

Dr Rachel Turner-King and a team of volunteers organised a pop-up Story Garden in Canley Community Centre, with four themed areas of Spring, Summer, Autumn and Winter representing different aspects of learning.

The public science festival, Pint of Science, is returning to Coventry this year with experts from the Universities of Warwick and Coventry talking about their research work in a selection of pubs and venues around the city.

This year academics will be appearing at Backhaus and Co at Fargo Village, The Yard and Shopfront Theatre in the city centre and The Old Clarence in Earlsdon, between 20 and 22 May. There will also be a programme of talks at the White Horse, Leamington Spa.

Among the topics the presenters will be covering are Martians, DNA, electricity and magnetism, dyslexia, pollution, soil, cells, plastic and paramedics. They will also be tackling important issues like sexual health, the importance of sleep, and asking who’d win in a fight – the sun or a trillion lions?

Tickets are on sale now from: pintofscience.co.uk/events/coventry

Engineers and researchers at WMG, University of Warwick, are working alongside Transport Design International (TDI), based in Stratford, to develop a battery-powered, lightweight, rail-based vehicle to operate in Coventry.

The WMG team, including engineers Darren Hughes and Andrew McGordon, are using their automotive engineering and battery expertise to assist TDI with the design of the vehicle for Coventry City Council, and now have a 3D simulation of the vehicle.

The University of Warwick has teamed up with national educational charity IntoUniversity to launch a new project aimed at raising aspirations and improving educational outcomes for children and young people in Coventry.

The IntoUniversity Coventry centre, based in the Hillfields area of the city, will be run by national education charity IntoUniversity in partnership with the University.

Building on existing outreach programmes the centre will work with up to 1,000 children and young people each year, to help them make the best of their talents and improve their chances of gaining a university place.

The Coventry centre, based in the St Peter’s Centre on Charles Street, is already working with three primary schools, two secondary schools and a Sixth Form college in the area. Over one hundred students have signed up to receive after-school support, access to university-student mentors, workshops and insight into university life.

The latest update of the prestigious Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, has added details on the lives of three of Coventry’s town planners and designers published on Thursday 14 February 2019, features the lives of some the individuals described by thanks to History of Art researcher Dr Otto Saumarez Smith at the University of Warwick. Dr Saumarez Smith was an advisory editor and key contributor to the update.

The three new entries on those who worked on Coventry were for the following:

Sir Wilfred Burns (1923-1984), Whose approach to planning was formed whilst an assistant planning officer at Coventry, which he described as ’by far the most ambitious and inspiring scheme in the country, and the plan most likely to fit in with contemporary and future society’. He was later head of planning at Newcastle upon Tyne, who sacrificed important aspects of its Georgian townscape for a new shopping centre and roundabout.

Percy Edwin Alan Johnson-Marshall (1915-1993), became senior assistant architect of Coventry’s newly formed city architect’s department in 1938, and he helped organize the exhibition ‘Coventry of Tomorrow’. His first wife was killed in the Coventry air raids. He later set up in private practice in Edinburgh, and his ideas were set out in his book Rebuilding Cities (1966).

Frederick [Fred] Bernard Pooley (1916-1998), was deputy city architect at Coventry, where he worked on the precinct, and he introduced high-rise blocks in Tile Hill. He was chief architect for Buckinghamshire, remembered though for his concrete tower in Aylesbury and his uncompleted monorail plan for North Buckinghamshire.

Coventry Library Service is working in partnership with the University of Warwick’s Centre of Lifelong Learning to offer IT support throughout November.

The pilot sessions will run in Canley library on Tuesdays from 10-12noon and on Thursday in Tile Hill library from 2-4pm.

If you head out on campus today, you may be in for a big surprise! Meet Rolf – our unofficial, but much loved, campus cat. We spoke to Rolf’s owner, Helen, to find out more about our meow-vellous campus superstar.

The University of Warwick is one of the leading Coventry and Warwickshire organisations which have joined together on a major project to support businesses across the region with education and training.

The Collaborate to Train Coventry and Warwickshire project is part funded by the European Social Fund, and aims to improve the ways in which education providers, local authorities and other stakeholders work together with businesses to provide high quality and effective education and training services in a more collaborative, user-led way.

The project, led by WCG (Warwickshire College Group), is especially targeted at small and medium enterprises (SMEs) and will look at ways to help them get involved in education and training, in particular through providing additional work experience placements, supported internships, apprenticeships and working with schools.

Over the next 5 years, the University is embarking on its next phase of building works, which includes nine development projects.

These include:

• A new Faculty of Arts on the central campus
• A new Interdisciplinary Biomedical Research Building (IBRB) at Gibbet Hill
• Residences for up to 1,000 students

As these combined projects will give rise to new floorspace and new parking requirements which are not reflected in the 2009 Masterplan, a fresh planning permission is required.

The University is preparing a single hybrid planning application (with some projects submitted for detailed approval and others for outline permission) to cover all nine projects and enable their combined impacts to be considered together. The application will be submitted to Coventry City Council as all projects lie within Coventry’s administrative boundary.

Join us on Monday 21st of May, 2018 at the Theatre Absolute space in central Coventry for an opportunity to debate and discuss political issues that concern you and your community, and for a chance to meet and interact with others who are passionate about Britain’s political life. The event, which is free of charge, will start at around 11am and will finish at 3pm and will include lunch.

The University of Warwick is celebrating Coventry’s latest accolade - European City of Sport.

The City has been announced as winning the title European City of Sport 2019 after a successful bid was made this year by Coventry City Council and key partners including the University of Warwick.

The news comes after Coventry was named City of Culture 2021, in addition to helping to host the Commonwealth Games in 2022 which will be held in our region. The University of Warwick is currently developing a new multi-million pound Sport and Wellness Hub which is due for completion in 2019 and will create one of the best sports facilities at a UK university.

We are hosting a drop-in consultation to seek your views on our plans for the development of the University of Warwick campus over the next three to five years on Wenesday 23 May in the Felden Building on Westwood Campus.

The public science festival, Pint of Science, is coming to Coventry for the first time this year, with experts from the Universities of Warwick and Coventry talking about their research work in a selection of pubs and venues around the city.

● Head down to your local pub to hear talks on everything from making sunscreen to levitating diamonds
● More than 30 scientists to appear in city watering holes, as the world's largest festival of public science talks arrives in Coventry
● Coventry to join nearly 300 cities around the world taking part in this global festival from the 14 – 16 May
● Tickets on sale now at pintofscience.co.uk/events/coventry

A week-long pop-up exhibition celebrating Coventry’s local history via the television archive will be held at Theatre Absolute’s Shop Front Theatre, 38 City Arcade, Coventry, CV1 3HW between the 16th and 20th April 2018. Visitors will engage with various screens (including a pair of vintage living room sets) displaying programmes made in and about Coventry, many of which have not been seen since their original broadcast.

Highlights include the documentary Coventry Kids: People of a Restless City (BBC, 1960), Philip Donnellan’s lyrical documentary about a multi-cultural postwar Coventry, About Religion: The New Coventry Plays No. 1: ‘This is the End’ (ITV/ATV, 1962), the first of a series of modern religious plays written especially for the new Coventry Cathedral, and Arena: Rudies Come Back or The Rise and Rise of 2-Tone (BBC2, 1980) an investigation of the pop music genre at the heart of Coventry’s music scene in the 1980s, produced by Alan Yentob for BBC Bristol.

Following the city’s winning bid to become UK City of Culture, Coventry schoolchildren are taking part in a new competition to bring the idea of cultural exchange and shared heritage to life. The Two Chairs Creative Writing competition, which is open to all across the UK invites people to see the world from the ‘other’ perspective.

Inspired by the Hafez-Goethe Monument of two empty chairs, the competition was started by Dr James Hodkinson of the University of Warwick and asks entrants to write and submit pieces in English or German, whether they be poems, short stories or prose, that express what the chairs say to them.

Prizes of £250 will be awarded to the winners of the Under 18 and Over 18 categories in both English in German.

To celebrate a new partnership with The Sunday Times/Peters Fraser + Dunlop Young Writer of the Year Award, the University of Warwick has launched the freeflow Festival.

Taking place on Wednesday 29th November 2017, the freeflow Festival is a day packed full of events across campus featuring some of the best names in the literary world including Owen Sheers, Sarah Moss, Natalie Haynes, and Jess Green. In addition, fresh from the Glastonbury stage and a five star run at the Edinburgh Fringe, the poets, rappers, musicians and storytellers - Tongue Fu – will perform at The Assembly in Leamington Spa.

Roads in Coventry and Birmingham are set to become a world-class UK testbed for developing the next generation connected and autonomous (CAV) vehicles, thanks to a new £25m programme of investment being led by WMG at the University of Warwick.

The pioneering venture, undertaken by a consortium of research and industry partners, will make UK roads ready for CAVs by developing wireless networks, analysing how vehicles behave in real urban environments and involving the public in their evaluations.

The UK Central CAV Testbed will be based on 80 kilometres of urban roads in Coventry and Birmingham, creating a world-leading connected infrastructure and eco-system, and positioning the Midlands as a centre for cutting-edge automotive and communication technologies.